Students and engineers interested in contributing to Fedora Linux on Raspberry Pi

[Joel Savitz]

Good afternoon,

A group of computer science undergraduates and I are interested in
contributing to the usability of Fedora Linux on the Raspberry Pi 4.

I was a part of this group as an undergrad and we developed a compatibility
layer for translating RPi.GPIO syntax into calls to libgpiod. It is
currently available on PyPi and under review for inclusion in Fedora:
https://github.com/underground-software/RPi.GPIO2
https://pypi.org/project/RPi.GPIO2/

The maintainer of the (broken) RPi.GPIO fedora package agreed to obsolete
it in favor of our new package, which is a drop in replacement for RPi.GPIO
(hence the 2), however I have not heard from him since September.

Anyway, we are looking for a new project or area of Fedora on the Raspberry
Pi to improve over the upcoming semester. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Best,
Joel Savitz

[Matthew Miller]

On Wed, Jan 13, 2021 at 04:42:54PM -0500, Joel Savitz wrote:
>  Anyway, we are looking for a new project or area of Fedora on the
> Raspberry
>  Pi to improve over the upcoming semester. Does anyone have any suggestions? 
Hi Joel! I'll let some of the ARM folks answer your specific question about
where help is most useful. I just wanted to say welcome and thanks for the
offer!

(Removing the google group from CC since I'm not a member.)


-- 
Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org&gt;
Fedora Project Leader

[Jeremy Linton]

Hi,

Welcome!

On 1/13/21 3:42 PM, Joel Savitz wrote:
>  Good afternoon,
>  
>  A group of computer science undergraduates and I are interested in
>  contributing to the usability of Fedora Linux on the Raspberry Pi 4.
>  
>  I was a part of this group as an undergrad and we developed a compatibility
>  layer for translating RPi.GPIO syntax into calls to libgpiod. It is
>  currently available on PyPi and under review for inclusion in Fedora:
>  https://github.com/underground-software/RPi.GPIO2
>  https://pypi.org/project/RPi.GPIO2/
>  
>  The maintainer of the (broken) RPi.GPIO fedora package agreed to obsolete
>  it in favor of our new package, which is a drop in replacement for RPi.GPIO
>  (hence the 2), however I have not heard from him since September.
>  
>  Anyway, we are looking for a new project or area of Fedora on the Raspberry
>  Pi to improve over the upcoming semester. Does anyone have any suggestions? 
 From my perspective, the main issues with the rpi4 and fedora surround 
low level firmware/driver problems. That is what keeps it from "just 
working" as expected with a standard fedora image.

As such you might want to take a look at:
https://github.com/lategoodbye/rpi-zero/issues/43
which is the running conversation about upstream kernel features that 
need work.

On the firmware side you might look at 
https://github.com/pftf/RPI4/issues which is a mix of bugs and future 
features required to make the platform behave as expected.

There is probably a uboot related list too, but I don't know where it 
is. Peter can probably comment.

Finally besides Trusted Firmware, there is a project that seeks to 
replace the videocore firmware as well 
https://github.com/librerpi/rpi-open-firmware. If that happens it would 
remove another longstanding binary blob used to boot the platform.

There are of course others, but that should provide a few starting places.

Welcome again!

[Peter Robinson]

Hi Joel,

I've taken the group off as I'm not a member.

>  A group of computer science undergraduates and I are interested in
> contributing to the usability of Fedora Linux on the Raspberry Pi 4.
>
>  I was a part of this group as an undergrad and we developed a compatibility layer for
> translating RPi.GPIO syntax into calls to libgpiod. It is currently available on PyPi and
> under review for inclusion in Fedora:
>  https://github.com/underground-software/RPi.GPIO2
>  https://pypi.org/project/RPi.GPIO2/ 
This is a great start but ultimately it needs to be integrated with
the upstream RPi.GPIO project because there's literally 1000s of
documents, blog posts, paper books that reference that so for it to be
able to be used without having to update all of those having the
support upstream in the original project is the only easy way without
having to go and edit all of those docs.

>  The maintainer of the (broken) RPi.GPIO fedora package agreed to
> obsolete it in favor of our new package, which is a drop in replacement for RPi.GPIO
> (hence the 2), however I have not heard from him since September. 
Have you had any engagement with upstream (not Fedora) maintainer of RPi.GPIO?

>  Anyway, we are looking for a new project or area of Fedora on the
> Raspberry Pi to improve over the upcoming semester. Does anyone have any suggestions?
I have a number of ideas how high/low end sort of projects are you
interested in? Is kernel or other low level stuff of interest? Is
there particular areas that the group is interested in?

Peter

[Joel Savitz]

>  Have you had any engagement with upstream (not Fedora) maintainer of
>  RPi.GPIO?
>  
As our project is a total rewrite of RPi.GPIO we have not yet
interacted with the original upstream maintainer, but that's a good
suggestion. I'll reach out to Ben Croston and see what he thinks of our
project.



>  I have a number of ideas how high/low end sort of projects are you
>  interested in? Is kernel or other low level stuff of interest? Is
>  there particular areas that the group is interested in?
>  
The group is interested in doing something low level such as kernel, but we
are still trying to figure out an area of work with an appropriate scope.
Do you have any recommendations for a low level area of improvement in
which a group of students could reasonably make progress over the next 3-4
months?

Joel

[Peter Robinson]

On Mon, Jan 18, 2021 at 6:59 PM Joel Savitz <joelsavitz(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
> >
> > Have you had any engagement with upstream (not Fedora) maintainer of RPi.GPIO?
>
>  As our project is a total rewrite of RPi.GPIO we have not yet interacted with the
> original upstream maintainer, but that's a good suggestion. I'll reach out to Ben
> Croston and see what he thinks of our project.
>
>
> >
> > I have a number of ideas how high/low end sort of projects are you
> > interested in? Is kernel or other low level stuff of interest? Is
> > there particular areas that the group is interested in?
>
>  The group is interested in doing something low level such as kernel, but we are still
> trying to figure out an area of work with an appropriate scope.
>  Do you have any recommendations for a low level area of improvement in which a group of
> students could reasonably make progress over the next 3-4 months? 
So it's going to take me a few days to reply, what I think I'll if
that's OK do a theme per reply. Do you have a list of hardware you
currently have available? HATs, sensors etc?

[Joel Savitz]

>  So it's going to take me a few days to reply, what I think
> I'll if
>  that's OK do a theme per reply. Do you have a list of hardware you
>  currently have available? HATs, sensors etc?
>  
We have a couple of senseHATs, some lights, buttons, temperature sensors,
and other odds and ends on hand, but are able to acquire additional
peripherals for a project as needed.

[Peter Robinson]

On Wed, Jan 20, 2021 at 6:53 PM Joel Savitz <joelsavitz(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
> >
> > So it's going to take me a few days to reply, what I think I'll if
> > that's OK do a theme per reply. Do you have a list of hardware you
> > currently have available? HATs, sensors etc?
>
>  We have a couple of senseHATs, some lights, buttons, temperature sensors, and other odds
> and ends on hand, but are able to acquire additional peripherals for a project as needed.
So first set of ideas - Sense HAT related:

1) Upstream the display driver
The downstream driver is referenced, to go upstream it would likely
need to be a tinydrm style driver, there's a number of examples of
those in drivers/gpu/drm/tiny/
https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/blob/rpi-5.10.y/drivers/video/fbdev/...

2) Upstream the joystick/input driver
Similar to the display, there's a joystick
https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/blob/rpi-5.10.y/drivers/input/joysti...

For both of the above there's a dependency on a MFD driver:
https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/blob/rpi-5.10.y/drivers/mfd/rpisense...

3) A simple python based weather station
The sensors, when enabled using the overlay are available using the
kernel IIO framework. There's a library libiio with python bindings so
it would be cool to have a little mini weather station project, that
could be used with other HATs that have the various environmental
sensors. Options to display this data to a screen/leds such as those
on the sense HAT or to send them out via MQTT would be cool too.