[Arm-netbook] Kernel for JUSTOP Android 4.0 TV Box - MPA040BKT

[Tomás Galán]

Hi everybody,

A colleague at work gave me this box a few months back and after a few
attempts to get rid of a pink screen issue using the default Android
firmwares I decided to move to Linux (and guess what, the screen was
showing the correct colors so it's not a hardware issue).

I've tested a few distributions from Guillaume's Playground for the
A1000 Mele but I have a couple of issues with the kernel so I decided
to go one step forward and try to recompile it for this hardware.

I'm not completely sure where to start as it's the first time that I
try such thing. Let's assume that I have Ubuntu, all the packages
installed and the git mirror for the A10 kernel. Now which options do
I have to configure on menuconfig?

The main differences/issues that I've found until now with the Mele distros are:

1 - Wrong memory size. My board has 1GB of RAM and it only detects
448MB (512 - 64 for the graphics, I guess).
2 - GPIO mismatch. There is a script called PIMP_MY_MELE where one of
the options allows easy configuration of the blue and red LEDs when
booting. The blue LED works fine but the red one doesn't so I'm pretty
sure that the GPIO pins used are different on both boards. I only have
this one so I don't think it's easy.
3 - Screen refresh issues. Sometimes the screen doesn't refresh
correctly. From the command line, if I fill the screen so that the
cursor is at the bottom, then I type some command and I press the
backspace, everything that I've typed goes missing for a few seconds
and it shows the pixels completely out of sequence. I guess it has
something to do with the MALI driver. I also found a weird behavior on
XBMC where the cursor stays blinking on the screen while the rest of
the screen is displayed correctly. However, the transparency doesn't
work so the border of windows in XBMC has a black dotted pattern
rather than transparent colors.
4 - The box feels warmer even when there's no demanding tasks running.
I would have to check that with a proper thermometer or using
lmsensors if available.

If anyone is interested, there is a video on youtube with pictures of
the board in detail:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Z521xGvVnk

I also have a copy of the boot partition files from the Android
firmware showing the right parameters (I hope so) for the memory and
other stuff (script.bin, magic.bin, etc.).

Any help/advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance!
Tom