Any Interest in ARMv7 builds

[Bromf]

Count me in for testing !!
I have a Pi(1)B  a 2B and a 3B

[agent_kith]

My Pi B+ arrived couple days ago, havn't had time to fire it up yet. But will do so soonish. Can't wait to get Snakeoil working on the ARM architecture again.

[polarlight]

Good results can be obtained using a conventional smartphone as an audio source. Such data was received by our friend running Debian on his smartphone with 8 cores and 3 GB of RAM. And it looks like Android.

[Image: forumdocto_4561874_30235107.jpg]

This is how popular players look when they run under Android. The first graph is the sine of 1 kHz, the second jitter test, a test signal with 44100 smartphone on the E-MU 0202.
Aimp
[Image: forumdocto_1263294_30235104.jpg] [Image: forumdocto_1221367_30235108.jpg]
Foobar2000
[Image: forumdocto_2483443_30235113.jpg] [Image: forumdocto_9773831_30235116.jpg]
VLC
[Image: forumdocto_9427070_30235119.jpg] [Image: forumdocto_4507820_30235120.jpg]
Classic for Linux VLC is the best.

The same signal from PC, Album Player, was written on e-MU 0202
AP192 sound card
[Image: forumdocto_7184651_30235146.jpg]
Realtek ALC892
[Image: forumdocto_7969001_30235152.jpg]

A link to the forum author's Album Player, post #13058:
http://forum.doctorhead.ru/index.php?s=7...5&st=13075

Friends, maybe it's time to switch to smartphones and tablets as audio sources?

[agent_kith]

Wow.. Didn't know foobar2k is now on Android.

I reckon Smartphones/tablets will be the way of the future (or rather, the future is a mobile operating system Android). It's something that's on my mind and will be something to consider down the roll. i.e. roll our a special android build specifically for audio, or audio/video (aka a high end video player).

Alas time is the problem for me, somewhat unfortunate that I can't do this full time..

[vv329]

Although I am not sure if ARM SOC is powerful enough to handle 8 channels 96/24 crossover processing, I would like to see it working on Odriod XU-4.

[agent_kith]

Although I am not sure if ARM SOC is powerful enough to handle 8 channels 96/24 crossover processing, I would like to see it working on Odriod XU-4.

Maybe they are not powerful enough now, but in future it will be? Hopefully to get it all ready before then.

Hope to start working on this soon, been so tired in the last month I hardly have the energy to do anything after work.

[agent_kith]

Unfortunately havn't had much time to look into this the past few weeks. However, finally managed to get a microsd card, and fired up the Pi 3B+ purchased way back in May with Raspbian. Machine boots up fine and all went well.

First step is to setup the web server and that works easily.

Second step is to port all (if not most) the music players as well the Snakeoil Web App over.

Some of the Snakeoil tweaks probably don't work in the Pi world, so they need to be disabled. This will be the third and probably final step. After which the Pi edition will be released.

Not entirely sure of ETA, but hope to begin working on this later after work.

Note that this is just the planning stage at the moment. Not entirely sure if I'd hit any technical hurdles or not. Time will tell.

[agent_kith]

Progressing slowly, but at least there's progress! Some more things left to do:

1. Custom RT kernel with custom DSD DAC support
   I have done this a long time ago, hopefully can re-create the magic now.
   
   
2. Rebuild all the custom libs and playback software
   This is likely to take a while.
   
   
3. Disable Things That Do Not Make Sense In Pi
   Some things may well not work in the Pi environment. Have to find out what they are and disable accordingly. This is not going to be a big issue so it's OK for some things to be missed in the first release
   
   
4. Repackage the image
   Need to remove unnecessary packages, services. Shrink the image down into a managable download size and put it online. Ideally I would like to cross compile the Pi stuffs on a Linux machine, but alas my home lab is running out of RAM to make this possible. For now I will just have to build everything on a Pi, it is just going to take longer to release, but it'd have to do for now.
   
   
5. Update the Snakeoil Manual
   Not going to think about this for now. Will cross the bridge when we've come this far.
   

 

[agent_kith]

And we have the first test Raspberry Pi firmware. Technically this should work with any Debian based Arm v7 CPU. However, strangely, the firmware is about 3x bigger. Mainly because the MPD build is bigger somehow. 

Not entirely sure what the problem is at the moment. But will continue to test/troubleshoot.
 

Code:

-rw-r--r-- 1 snakeoil snakeoil 37153992 Aug 26 21:38 snakeoil-1.1.0-armv7l.fw
-rw-rw-r-- 1 snakeoil snakeoil 13280943 Aug 20 19:57 snakeoil-1.1.0-i686.fw
-rw-rw-r-- 1 snakeoil snakeoil 13558437 Aug 20 19:57 snakeoil-1.1.0-x86_64.fw

[agent_kith]

Fixed the firmware file now, it's a lot smaller now:

Code:

-rw-r--r-- 1 snakeoil snakeoil 11977945 Aug 28 21:38 snakeoil-1.1.0-armv7l.fw
-rw-rw-r-- 1 snakeoil snakeoil 13280943 Aug 20 19:57 snakeoil-1.1.0-i686.fw
-rw-rw-r-- 1 snakeoil snakeoil 13558437 Aug 20 19:57 snakeoil-1.1.0-x86_64.fw

And the RT kernel is up and running:



Only tested this image on Pi 2B and Pi 3B+ though. Think I am going to call the machine snakeoil.local (to make this consistent with the Intel builds).. Still some way to go, but at least it's another step forward.