Distributions
Tizen Common and open hardware
At the Tizen Developer Summit in Shanghai, Leon Anavi and Philippe Coval presented a talk about adapting Tizen to run on a variety of open-source hardware devices. The version of Tizen they used in their projects, Tizen Common, is the base layer that does not include modules specific to any of the commercial device profiles that Tizen targets: mobile phones, smart TVs, wearables, and so on. But that stripped-down design may make it the fastest route to getting Tizen installed on a variety of readily available single-board computers (SBCs).
The pair of speakers began with introductions. Anavi is an independent open-source developer living in Bulgaria, and has had a long history developing for projects like Maemo, MeeGo, and Qt—which, he said, made it a natural fit for him to get involved in Tizen as well. Coval works at Eurogiciel, a software consultancy in France. As it happens, Tizen Common was originally developed at Eurogiciel: the company was interested in seeing if it could refactor the core set of packages common to Tizen's different device profiles into a separate layer. The experiment proved so useful that the Tizen project formally adopted it, and Eurogiciel now has several developers contracted to work on it.
Tizen-sunxi
Anavi explained that Tizen Common is designed not just to be neutral with regard to the various device profiles used in products, but also to be "inclusive"—so although the smart-TV profile may use X11 and the in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) profile uses Wayland instead, both packages will build against Tizen Common. Similarly, all Tizen Common packages are tested for Intel and ARM architectures, multiple graphical toolkits, and so on.
![[Leon Anavi at TDS 2014]](https://static.lwn.net/images/2014/10-tds-anavi-sm.jpg "Leon Anavi")
In a way, that makes the actual hardware the only real difficult part of bringing Tizen up on a new device. Many SBCs, he said, including the wildly popular Raspberry Pi, use binary blobs that make porting difficult if not impossible. Thus, Anavi has chosen to work with boards that are open hardware. He said that he prefers to work with the OLinuXino SBC line from Olimex, but he has successfully brought Tizen Common up on a variety of ARM-based SBCs.
He showed several of his personal projects, including an OLinuXino-based laptop that he built from an SBC and a Motorola Lapdock (which is a now-discontinued laptop-style dock built to provide a full-size screen and keyboard for a Motorola smartphone) and an OLinuXino-based seven-inch tablet complete with touchscreen input.
Anavi then pointed to a March 2014 survey published at Linux.com showing the SBCs most popular with developers. ARM dominates, with the Galileo board being the only Intel option in the top ten. But even more interesting was the fact that four of the top ten boards were built around system-on-chips (SoCs) from Chinese manufacturer Allwinner—including the OLinuXino line.
He started porting Tizen Common to a variety of Allwinner-based SBCs, and put the results up at GitHub under the name tizen-sunxi. The name reflects the importance of the linux-sunxi project, which is a community effort to get the Linux kernel running on Allwinner SoCs.
At the moment, he said, tizen-sunxi runs successfully on the A1X generation of Allwinner hardware, which includes A10 and A10S-based SBCs from OLinuXino, and on the A20 series. The A20-OlinuXino-MICRO SBC, he said, is the current reference device, since it contains no closed components (there are, evidently, other Allwinner devices on which the tizen-sunxi images will run, including some that ship with binary blobs). Newer generations of Allwinner SoCs are in varying states of readiness; he said that the A33 series was progressing well, while the eight-core A80T series was more of an "eventually" target.
For each SBC, Anavi explained, the process of building Tizen Common was pretty similar. He uses the U-Boot bootloader, which is what the linux-sunxi project uses, and generally is also able to clone linux-sunxi kernels and build them successfully without modification. The first Tizen-specific step is building the Tizen Common root filesystem, followed by building a set of RPM packages using git-build-system (GBS). He then needs to create a kickstart (.ks) file that describes the partitioning and setup options, then to build a platform image using MIC. If everything goes well, the image can be loaded onto a bootable SD card, and started on the SBC. Although the process is relatively easy, he advised keeping UART hardware handy just in case.
Currently, Anavi has published Tizen Common images on his GitHub site for A10 and A20 SoCs, which should work on several dozen Allwinner-based SBCs. They support HDMI output as well as directly-connected LCD displays. In many cases, he said, the device can dual-boot Tizen Common and Android, which he hopes will appeal to hardware hackers who already have some of the many Allwinner devices currently running Android.
MinnowMax
![[Philippe Coval at TDS 2014]](https://static.lwn.net/images/2014/10-tds-coval-sm.jpg "Philippe Coval")
Coval then presented his portion of the session, describing how to build and run Tizen Common on the MinnowBoard MAX. The MinnowBoard MAX is a fully open-hardware device—even the firmware is open-source, he said—produced by CircuitCo, the Texas company best known for developing the BeagleBone line of SBCs. The "MinnowMax" (as it is often abbreviated) is an Intel Atom-based SBC that uses an Intel HD graphics chip and has a variety of PC-like components on board, such as USB 3, HDMI, and SATA (in addition to SD card storage) connectors.
All of the MinnowMax's design files are published under the CC-BY-SA license, and all of the hardware adaptation steps in board bring-up are simple because everything is in the mainline kernel. A variety of other Linux distributions are known to work on the device, including Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, and RHEL, Coval said, so he decided to try Tizen Common.
As it turned out, "porting" to the MinnowMax required no extra work. The same official images that are released by Tizen for the Intel NUC device run as-is on the MinnowMax. Nevertheless, he continued, if anyone wants to experiment with building it from scratch, the process is straightforward—albeit different from the method described by Anavi.
The MinnowMax is supported by the Yocto embedded-distribution build framework (in the "meta-intel" layer), but building Tizen images with Yocto is the subject of a relatively new effort within the Tizen project. Eurogiciel has several developers working on it, he said, and both Tizen Common and Tizen IVI images are successfully building on a regular basis.
The process of bringing Tizen Common up on the MinnowMax hardware was fairly painless, so Coval hopes it will attract attention from others in the active MinnowBoard community. The project was also featured in Coval's other talk, during which he described how to start developing for and contributing to Tizen Common. In that talk, Coval listed several external packages that he had built for Tizen Common—including some, like XBMC, that one might expect to be tricky. In practice, though, he found that no special steps were required; even with XBMC, compiling from source on Tizen Common works just like it would on any general-purpose distribution.
How common
On one hand, the fact that a non-device-specific incarnation of Tizen is relatively easy both to port to new hardware and to compile other software on should perhaps come as no surprise at all. One of the project's founding design principles, after all, was to take a "standard" Linux stack and build it into a system on which embedded products could be developed. If the base layer did not run contemporary Linux programs, that would probably be more newsworthy.
At the same time, though, the Tizen project has taken some steps to emphasize that it does not want Tizen Common to be seen as a finished product itself. In a session about creating new device profiles, Tizen Common's lead architect Dominig ar Foll cautioned against packaging software for Tizen Common, and made it clear that the only packages included in Tizen Common would be those that originated in active Tizen device-profile projects and were then moved upstream to Common.
So "Common" may not become a development target, officially, but it could still develop a life of its own as a simple testbed. The fact that Tizen Common has become a way to run a less profile-specific version of Tizen on general-purpose hardware will, no doubt, attract potential developers who have access to SBCs, but who are not building phones or smart TVs. And that, of course, can only be good for the project.
[The author would like to thank the Tizen Association for travel assistance to attend TDS 2014.]
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