Port of released Broadcom CPU and GPU drivers to AOSP based ROMs for BCM21553 SoCs

Hi to all Broadcom BCM215XX armv6 devices running android!

I'm glad to announce that, our organisation, BroadcomCM will start working on the port of AOSP ICS drivers for our CPU and GPU, BCM21553. First of all, I've asked moderators to close all my threads, why? We know we have [GENERAL] Thread for our projects but most users don't care, so this will be the thread to talk about it, development!.

Samsung stopped the development on this devices long ago, but their drivers where not ever released. Thanks to our petition, we have managed to force Broadcom to release the drivers, and we managed to release them on ICS, android 4.0+, way!

Index:
Post 1 (this) ...................................... Information about drivers
Post 2 .............................................. Frequently asked questions
Post 3 .............................................. Drivers on Github (Opensource)
Post 4 .............................................. Videos showing HW working

Click to expand...

Click to collapse

A bit of introduction:
Broadcom gave to us test driver builds, which were prebuilt, .so libraries, and we could not edit them, but they gave us the code to patch framework to make those prebuilt libraries work with our AOSP project (by that time, CyanogenMod 7.2). After some re-search and lot of work on our team (thanks Legolas93), I managed to implement AOSP Alcatel drivers to our CyanogenMod 7.2 Based ROM. This was the biggest change ever happened to that device, as we managed to fix 100% HW and as a cosnequence, libstatgefright was fixed too, and HGL. This resulted on camera/vide recordi (media profiles, encoding and decoding) to work, this was RC1. REMEMBER: As we extracted this libs from sotck AOSP alcatel ROM they are prebuilt, so we can not modify them at all.
SInce that moment, project on HW was stopped, and we focused to fix other issues not releted to HW (ext4, backlight, led, tethering, BT...), and we managed (most of them), and everyone enjoys now a CM, AOSP and Cyanmobile port brought to you by broadcomCM.

What else?
Broadcom released, or seemed to, BCM21553 driver source for AOSP ICS source. They released the source, so now we can know how our chip work. What is weird about it, is that this chip is released for ICS source, when it is an armv6 chip, and any device of our family has official ICS. (Maybe BROADCOM are really nice people, or maybe they trolled us). We will add new tag to be defined on Boardconfig.mk to make the drivers work on it.

So.. We did it?
Yes, we forced Broadcom to release the source, you, we, we all did this possible, and we should be prud of ourselves.

Will with this come BroadcomCM to develop?
Well, yes and no, we already have some surpises for BroadcomCM ROMs owner, which were not reletated to drivers at all, and they affect all devices. As this work is nearly finished (first alpha), we will release this next week, and then we will start working on it. Keep calm, good things make people wait for it don't ?

What is now?
Now, nice question. We will implement this source code on our CM9, ICS, branch. (all sources can be found on our github), and implement them on the build, will that be easy? OF COURSE NOT. Broadcom trolled us with first test builds of drivers, so maybe expect the same from that sources, we don't know and we will not know unitl we build it, and we have to compare each file, ONE PER ONE, so it will be a hard work.

Frequently asked questions can be found on the second post, as well as a video to show you what was having a device with drivers, and what was not. (Qualcomm vs Broadcom [armv6]).

ANY ETA? (Estimated Time of Arrival)
No. I can not tell any eta, I'll maintain you informed to you on this thread. I'll start my work next week (Exams on this one, need to study ), and I'll keep calm, I'm as amazed as you, but we have to be very down to earth. Broadcom lied to us, maybe they made it too. It will take some time to study and implement, and then make them work!

WILL THAT FIX ALL THE ISSUES WE HAVE ON ICS?
No, but will fix the most important one, HW. What I mean by hardware is the animations will be smooth, video on second post. So hopefully we will run a good ICS build, but expect camera and Audio not working too. Audio? Well some progress have been made on shadows, camera? That will be hard, really hard. Even Cooper (Galaxy Ace MSM7x27 based chip wasn't able to run camera at the first, since Qualcomm not release their source too).

AND WHAT ABOUT CM7 (2.3.7 based roms)?
We hope 2.3.7 ROMs will benefict from it, but we are not sure, we will have to test them and implement on our CM7 tree, but as they are for ICS, or this seems to, first goal is ICS, as we have 100% HW working, but with prebuilt, for the moment is OK and not our priority,

CAN I IMPLEMENT THE DRIVERS ON MY DEVICE?
No, to implement those dirvers you will need big knowledge of BroadcomCM devices, and I think our team has. We have managed to solve many bugs, and, talk with broadocm to solve first driver errors we had.

Ok, we have managed to get drivers working on our CyanogenMod 9.1 Ice Cream Sandwich version 4.0.4. Remember the drivers were given in 4.0.1 which were a bit different from actual 4.0.4 used.

After the release of the ROM with first version of those drivers included, we are glad to announce that, as always, we opensourced this "4.0.4 drivers" as well as Broadcom did. Feel free to take them, and use it at your own, to build diferent ROMs, such as AOKP, Paranoid, AOSP... Or Jelly Bean . This are drivers source, you will need to cherry-pick them to your local repo:

• /bionic
• /frameworks/base
• /hardware/libhardware
• /system/core

Broadcom was nice, and they created a new HGL lib, which they open-sourced too, and give the name of libv3d, kind of a new HGL lib, which should complish all patches and BCM21553 requiriments, also opensourced on BroadcomCM.

• /brcm_usrlib also known as libv3d

You can also find original patch on Broadcom's page (4.0.1 patch) and the diff files I've made, which they will give you more clues on how to implement them on other sources.

On those videos, we can see that those drivers are fully working! Thanks for those youtubers, we can show to the world that WE DID IT!


ME presenting those drivers:

COOPERVE:



TOTORO:





TASSVE:



CORI: (WIP)