Beagleboard-XM Rowboat Gingerbread

Rowboat is a project which enables Android for Texas Instruments devices including OMAP35x, AM35x, AM37x, DM37x, AM389x, AM1808. Currently Rowboat Gingerbread is available for Beagleboard-xM. According to Android wiki, Android 2.3 Gingerbread refined the user interface, improved the soft keyboard and copy/paste features, improved gaming performance, SIP support (VoIP calls), and added support for Near Field Communication.

The latest Rowboat supports:

• similar to the features in rowboat-froyo-dsp.xml, but uses Stagefright multimedia framework instead of OpenCORE;
• Support up-to 720P MPEG4 ASP decoding @30fps @10Mbps;
• Support up-to 720P H.264 HP Lvl3.1 decoding @24fps @4Mbps;
• requires 1GHz DM37xx device to support 720P video decoding;

Rowboat DSP support is based on the TI Linux Digital Video Software Development Kit (DVSDK) for the OMAP3530/DM3730. The latest DVSDK is DVSDK_4.02 4_02_00_06. It includes

• DSP/Bios
• Codec engine
• DSP/Bios link
• DMAI
• OpenCore DMAI Codecs
• Additional DSP codecs (optional), for example, mp3 DSP codec

To build Rowboat Gingerbread on Beagleboard-XM, prepare a 32 linux machine with pre-installed git, java6-jdk, dos2unix, and expect utilities. The steps are:

1. Download repo. Make sure ~/bin is in $PATH # mkdir -p ~/bin

   # curl http://android.git.kernel.org/repo >~/bin/repo
   # chmod a+x ~/bin/repo

2. Download Rowboat Android # mkdir ~/rowboat-android

   # cd ~/rowboat-android
   # repo init -u git://gitorious.org/rowboat/manifest.git -m rowboat-gingerbread-dsp.xml
   # repo sync

3. Manually download the TI DVSDK_4.01 4_01_00_09 package to the external/ti-dsp folder from the table in webpage
4. Build Android with TI DSP stack use following command # cd ~/rowboat-android

   # make TARGET_PRODUCT=beagleboard OMAPES=5.x

5. Create the rootfs image, assuming TARGET_PRODUCT=omap3evm in the command above cd out/target/product/omap3evm

   # mkdir android_rootfs
   # cp -r root/* system android_rootfs
   # ../../../../build/tools/mktarball.sh ../../../host/linux-x86/bin/fs_get_stats android_rootfs . rootfs rootfs.tar.bz2

6. Download the TI Gingerbread Devkit 1.0 DM37x Prebuilt Image Package and untar it to get MLO and u-boot images
7. To get MLO and u-boot.bin for Beagleboard-xM, download the Beagleboard-xM Gingerbread prebuilt image package
8. Follow the instructions in ConfigureAndBuild#Prepare_SD_card to populate the rootfs to a SD card. Before copying uImage to the SD card, first copy MLO to the SD card first partition; also copy u-boot.bin into the same partition. MLO has to be copied first, otherwise the board will not boot.