First of all, I really appreciate the fast pace of feature updates on the Tachyon board with Ubuntu 24.04. It’s exciting to see new capabilities becoming available so quickly.
I do have one question, though. As far as I can tell, the Ubuntu 20.04 code for the Tachyon board is not available in the Particle git repository. On Ubuntu 20.04, most features were working properly, and I’m now in a situation where I would like to make further changes based on that stable state (for example, porting other drivers, modifying the device tree, and so on).
Would it be possible to upload the Ubuntu 20.04 source code for the Tachyon board to the git repository, or otherwise provide access to it?
If there is a specific reason why the Ubuntu 20.04 code cannot be uploaded or shared, I would appreciate it if you could let me know.
Thank you for your time and for your continued work on this project.
The 20.04 kernel source comes from our SoC vender, and contains a good bit of code from “off the shelf” code. I suspect some portion is under NDAA/proprietary/only distributable as a binary. To be frank, the 20.04 source is not very developer friendly. It's a pain to work with.
We’re aiming for a much more open reference with 24.04.
Is there anything specific you were looking to integrate that we might be able to help with in the meantime?
Thanks for the explanation — that helps a lot, and I appreciate.
I totally understand the situation around the Ubuntu 20.04 kernel, especially if it includes SoC vendor code with NDA or binary-only restrictions. That makes sense, and I can see why it wouldn’t be a great experience to maintain or publish it. I also really like the direction you’re taking with 24.04 as a more open and cleaner reference going forward.
To answer your question about what I’m trying to integrate, these are the main things I’m currently looking into:
Ethernet on a Raspberry Pi HAT+ board (RTL8156B)
I’m using a HAT+ board with an RTL8156B Ethernet controller.
This didn’t work for me on Ubuntu 20.04, so I’d like to understand the recommended way to get this working on 24.04 (driver support, kernel config, device tree, etc.).
OpenCL GPU support
OpenCL was available and usable on 20.04, and it’s an important feature for my use case.
I’m not sure what the current or planned story is for OpenCL on 24.04, so any guidance there would be great.
CSI camera support
For now, my goal is to get basic CSI camera support working at roughly the same level as 20.04.
Longer term I’m planning to use a GMSL camera, but I’d like to start with a simple CSI setup first.
If there’s any documentation, examples, or general guidance for handling these on 24.04, that would already be a huge help. I’m happy to adapt to the new stack — I just want to make sure I’m going in the right direction.
Thanks again for the quick response and for all the work you’re putting into the platform.
Quick follow-up on my original questions: I’ve now tested item (1) on Ubuntu 24.04, and the RTL8156B-based Ethernet on my Raspberry Pi HAT+ is working correctly. Link comes up and traffic passes fine, so Ethernet on this HAT is confirmed to work on 24.04. Thanks again for the help and all the work on the platform!
As a quick update on (2): on Ubuntu 24.04 I’ve been able to get OpenCL running on the GPU via Mesa/Rusticl, and that’s working for my current tests.(RUSTICL_ENABLE=freedreno)
I was wondering if there are any plans to port or support the KGSL driver for OpenCL on 24.04 (or in a future release)? That would be very helpful for my workload. Thanks again!
Quick update on (3) – camera support: today I noticed a new commit in the tachyon-ubuntu-24.04-kernel repo (tag 1.0.19) with the message:
Support camera IMX219/IMX519 (#23)
It looks like this adds support for the IMX219/IMX519 cameras. I still need to test it on my side, but I’ll try it out with my CSI setup and see how far I can get.
Thanks again for the update and for adding camera support!