LinRT Helium BSPs optimized for i.MX6 and i.MX8 platforms

LinRT Helium, Oxygen, Mercury, and Cobalt Yocto 2.6 BSPs are based on Yocto Rocko 2.4.4, Yocto Thud 2.6.4, and FSL Community BSP in order to provide support for i.MX based platforms and include official Linux kernel stable updates backported features and fixes coming from LinRT, vendors, kernel community or FSL Community itself. It includes support for many IPs such as GPU, VPU, and IPU for i.MX series processors.

All LinRT distributions are designed with Long Term Support Linux kernel 4.9 and 4.14 LTS with Board Support Packages oriented full hardware features support for NXP i.MX processors.

• Secure and fast boot approach
• Optimized and rugged files system images for typical use cases
• Low-latency and Real-time extensions available
• Stable packages and Security fixes
• Multimedia and video capture support
• For network-connected devices and fieldbus applications

LinRT proposes two solutions for GUI interface Framework, one with support with i.MX multi-framebuffer FSL Community/NXP’s BSP approach and the other with DRM/KMS support from Linux mainline kernel.

For 2021, new LinRT BSPs revision will be based on Yocto Dunfell 3.1 and Linux 5.4

Multi Framebuffer GUI interface Framework

LinRT Helium, Oxygen, Mercury, and Cobalt Yocto BSPs with multi-framebuffers use Linux FSLC/NXP i.MX API Compatibility and provides the most efficient IPU and VPU hardware support on Linux. This solution is recommended for applications that require the use of multiple separate-use displays, one as GUI touch panel and the other for the video screen, for example.
i.MX multi framebuffer support with imx-gpu-vivante 6.2.4 galcore driver and openGL ES2.0/3.0 extension

• Qt 5.9 LTS  and Qt 5.12 LTS framework openGL ES 2.0/3.0 support for Multi-FB and (eglfs, linuxfb minimal, offscreen and vnc platform plugins supported) or X11 server (linuxfb, minimal, offscreen, vnc and xcb platform plugins supported)
• Qt 5.9 and Qt 5.12 framework for Wayland/Weston GUI framework
• Xorg server 1.19.3 with xf86-video-imx-vivante 6.2.4 driver and Vivante DRM support (for X11 images only)

Note: for 2021, the new LinRT BSPs revision will be based on Qt 5.15 LTS framework

Demo and Pre-build Images

LinRT proposes demonstration images for each BSP version, with limited features for testing and full development images ready to go with SDK for Phytec Mira i.MX6 SBC, new Phytec Polaris i.MX8M and Polis i.MX8M-Mini SBC  SDKs for Pre-built images are provided with platform devicetree sources to give the possibility to rebuild it with your adaptations and own driver’s devicetree driver entries.

Available demo Images :

• LinRT full multimedia qt5 demo image
• LinRT X11 full multimedia qt5 demo image

Available Pre-built Images :

• LinRT headless tiny image
• LinRT tiny qt5 image
• LinRT tiny video capture image
• LinRT full multimedia image
• LinRT video capture image
• LinRT full multimedia Qt 5 image
• LinRT Wayland/Weston full multimedia Qt 5 image
• LinRT X11 full multimedia Qt 5 image
• LinRT X11/Sato full multimedia Qt 5 image
• LinRT HTML5 image
• LinRT X11 HTML5 image
• LinRT Debian 9 “Stretch” image for i.MX6Q/DL (Mainline Linux kernel or NXP Linux kernel 4.14 PREEMPT-RT BSP)

Note: for 2021, new LinRT Debian pre-built images will be based on 11 “Bullseye” image for iMX6Q/DL and iMX8M/M-Mini (with NXP Linux kernel 5.4 PREEMPT_RT BSP)

Software Development Kit and IDE support

LinRT Yocto SDKs are fully designed for Linux userland and kernel drivers developers, with complete cross-debugging and validation tools solution compatible with eclipse and Qt Creator IDE. The LinRT SDKs are built by collecting all development packages from Yocto’s recipes used for building the runtime Linux image, to have all necessary headers and libraries for your application development project.

• Yocto SDK GNU GCC and Linux headers
• Yocto Qt 5 LTS SDK with qmake spec environment for Yocto SDK toolchain and Device Kit
• OpenCV 3.3 C/C++ SDK libraries for NXP i.MX6 and i.MX8M
• Xenomai development packages and xeno-config tools for GNU C/C++ flags and build options
• NXP Kinetis IDE support for i.Mx7 RTOS applications with JTAG debug for M4 core

Multimedia and Video Capture Support

LinRT Yocto BSP provides, with full multimedia images, gstreamer-1.0 with hardware codecs and VPU support, H264 and MPEG4 encoder/decoder. For video capture on i.MX processor, LinRT proposes two solutions, with IPUv3 i.MX capture API, compatible with FSL Community BSP or with IPU and video4linux capture API from mainline Linux Kernel 4.14.

• Audio SDL2 with Hardware Codec Support
• Gstreamer-1.0 imx with Hardware codec support (GPU/VPU)
• Qt Multimedia Libraries
• Video4Linux with full hardware VPU encoder/decoder support (not available with Mainline BSP version)
• Video capture with Linux media capture API for i.MX from Linux kernel 4.14 (with Mainline BSP version only)
• OpenCV 3.3 image processing framework with GPU and VPU support for i.MX6/i.MX8

HTML5 Web solution

LinRT HTML5 solution is based on Qt 5.12 LTS QWebEngine Framework, itself based on Chromium version 56 with additional security fixes from newer versions, and openGL ES 2.0 support for i.MX6/i.MX8 Vivante GPUs. LinRT Yocto HTML5 image embeds a Node.JS server with MRRA and UPM libraries with specific platform hardware support, and offer HTTP, REST, and Websocket compatible APIs for developers.

• NodeJS 8.4
• MRRA and UPM libraries for i.MX6 phyCORE and phyFLEX SOMs
• Qt QWebEngine HTML5 render with GPU WebGL support.
• Full Chromium Web browser for X11 server with Vivante GPU support