Android on the PandaBoard

For some weekend fun, I thought I'd check out Android on the PandaBoard (a.k.a. "Pandroid", heh) and see how Android compared to my webOS phone (a Palm Pre).

The "installation" of Android was roughly equivalent to the Fedora 13 experience:

1. Create a small FAT partition and a larger ext3 partition on the SD card
2. Download Android (I grabbed L27.10.2-P1_pandroid_rls.tar.bz2)
3. Copy the bootloader/* files to the boot partition (MLO, u-boot.bin, and uImage)
4. Copy the myfs/* files to the root filesystem partition
5. Unmount the SD card and move it to the PandaBoard

Booting Android differed a bit from Fedora:

1. Connect USB2Serial cable and fire up minicom
2. Attach the power and...  it gives an error:
   booti: cannot find 'boot' partition
   Fastboot entered...

After searching the web for a while, I found a different set of boot arguments in the L27.10.2-P1 release notes to try (as opposed to this set of arguments):

setenv bootargs 'console=ttyO2,115200n8 androidboot.console=ttyO2 mem=456M@0x80000000 mem=512M@0xA0000000 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rw rootdelay=2 init=/init vram="32M" omapfb.vram=0:16M,1:16M consoleblank=0'
setenv bootcmd 'mmcinit 0;fatload mmc 0 0x80000000 uImage; bootm 0x80000000'
boot

Trying it again:

1. Hit the power reset button, then hit a key in minicom to interrupt the autoboot sequence
2. At the 'PANDA #' prompt, enter (copy and paste, actually) the above setenv commands for bootargs and bootcmd and then boot

It took a while to load (due to the slow SD card, more on this in a future post), but eventually Android popped up on my LCD monitor (connected with an HDMI-A to DVI-D cable).  The touch screen normally used on phone is simulated with a USB mouse and a regular cursor (left button is a finger tap, middle button is the menu, and right button is back), however, the cursor for the mouse was really slow and jumped around to try to keep up with mouse movements.

A bit more reading and I learned that the Android image does not include accelerated drivers for the PandaBoard's PowerVR SGX540 chipset.  Fortunately, drivers are just another quick download from Texas Instruments.  I grabbed the drivers for L27.10.2-P1 image and copied them to the SD card (using my regular Linux laptop again), booted once more, and the graphics were nice and snappy!

It seemed to have trouble bringing up the network (I think it needs more drivers), so I couldn't actually do a whole lot except fire up the basic apps that came with Android, e.g., calculator, address book, nothing too exciting, but the core OS worked!