Zephyr

Latest revision as of 10:46, 9 February 2013

(work in progress)

Zephyr is an attempt at creating a stack for use by other projects to be exploring lightweight, high-performance, next-generation UIs based on Mer, Qt5, QML compositor and Wayland. Come to #mer on irc.freenode.net to discuss and participate.

[edit] Reference hardware

• VirtualBox on X86, with LLVMpipe+Wayland

• ExoPC, X86 with Intel+Wayland (TBD)

• Raspberry Pi with QML compositor hardware integration for BRCM (TBD)

• Android devices through https://github.com/stskeeps/libhybris

[edit] OBS projects and architecture

We're hosting on the new Mer community OBS (https://build.merproject.org )

[edit] zephyr:devel:mw

Shared middleware for Zephyr based stacks.

• Lipstick2 (homescreen and compositor framework)

[edit] zephyr:devel:ux:breeze

Breeze is a open source, low end, QtQuick1, non-GLESv2 UX based on Zephyr middleware

[edit] zephyr:devel:ux:storm

Storm is a open source, QtQuick2, GLESv2 UX based on Zephyr middleware

[edit] zephyr:devel:hw

Zephyr-specific hardware adaptation pieces building against Zephyr middleware.

[edit] Kickstart files

Can be found through https://github.com/stskeeps/zephyr

zephyr-i586-vm.ks is for VirtualBox

Get Mer Platform_SDK to work with these.

[edit] TODO

• VirtualBox/X86 QML compositor needs to wait properly for input devices and framebuffer devices to appear before launching and sometimes fails to start compositor 3-4 times
• Get Harmattan QML components working on Qt5
• Integrate Maliit on Qt5

[edit] Architecture

Zephyr is based on the Mer Core. It boots with the help of systemd user sessions. The user session is described in zephyr-session package and it launches the Zephyr compositor (based on example QML compositor from qt-wayland). The Zephyr compositor signals to systemd that it has started and wayland clients can connect to it.

[edit] Adaptation: VirtualBox

You can make a 'livecd' image (mic cr livecd -A i686 zephyr-i586-vm.ks in Platform SDK) that you can run on a virtual machine.

You will need to make a virtual machine and run this:

 VBoxManage setextradata "Mer" CustomVideoMode1 "800x480x16"

before starting first time, here "Mer" is the name of your virtual machine. Set this to your desired resolution.

[edit] Steps to create Zephyr livecd image (without OpenGL support)

• Get the kickstart file from https://github.com/stskeeps/zephyr/blob/master/nogl-i586-vm.ks
• In the Mer platform SDK session, execute

sudo mic cr livecd -A i686 nogl-i586-vm.ks 

This will create iso image.

• Boot a new VM in virtualbox with iso image, make sure VM is configured to use bridged networking in VirtualBox.
• VM won't boot into UI, press Host + F2 to get into tty session, login as username=root and password=nemo
• Grab address of VM using ifconfig -a in virtualbox session, then ssh in using host and execute :

cd /usr/lib/qt5/examples/qtwayland/qwidget-compositor
QT_QPA_EGLFS_DEPTH=16 ./qwidget-compositor -platform linuxfb &
qmlviewer -platform wayland