Almost a year ago I took my Qt/DirectFB Jenkins down. With that CI for MIPS/uclibc and DirectFB stopped being done (as far as I know). It was a difficult decision but it reflected my situation. I didn’t do a Qt project for a long time and didn’t have any Qt related work on the horizon. My main work involves using Smalltalk (GNU Smalltalk and Pharo) and writing a lot of a C code for the various Osmocom/GSM related projects and the…
About a week ago I asked for help/support on the Continuous Integration of Qt for the combination of Linux/MIPS/UCLIBC/DirectFB and due the lack of feedback I have removed the DNS entry and cleaned up my system. This means that currently there is no (public) build testing for any of DirectFB, MIPS, UCLIBC and the bitrot will increase over time. I have asked on the mailinglist about the removal of the Broadcom 97425 device support as it likely to be unused now.
Are you running Qt on a MIPS based system? Is your toolchain using UCLIBC? Do plan to use Qt with DirectFB? If not you can probably stop reading. During the Qt5 development the above was my primary development platform and I spent hours improving the platform and the Qt support. I descended down to the kernel and implemented (and later moved) userspace callchain support for MIPS [1][2] in perf. This allows to get stacktraces/callchains for userspace binaries even when there…
OpenGL and Devices The future of Qt’s graphic stack is OpenGL (ES 2.0), but this makes things more complicated in the device space. The library names and low level initialization needed for OpenGL is not standardized. This means that for a given board one needs to link libQtGui to different libraries and one needs to patch the QPA platform plugins to add device specific bits. The GPU vendor might provide DirectFB/eGL integration but one needs to call a special function…
Ever since the start of the Qt project I am working on DirectFB in Qt5 (and Qt4) with the remote goal of getting QtMediaHub to run. It started with catching up with the rather nice refactoring of lighthouse in Qt5, fixing memory and resource leaks in Qt5, DirectFB and mostly in the DirectFB lighthouse plugin. It moved to dealing with broken “make install”, broken QML2 examples and documentation, figuring out how to get patches for QtV8/V8 into the project, adding…
The Qt project was launched today, I got my 15 DirectFB patches merged, got some first experience with Gerrit, created an account for the Qt wiki, fixed some documentation, so all in all I think it is the great start of the Qt Project we have been waiting for! So thank you very much for all you involved with it! Now to something completely else, somehow I like to see the parts that are not great yet. But most importantly…
Earlier this year I created a Hardware company with a friend to supply to our GSM community and beyond. One of our first products is the SIMtrace Hardware (CC Licensed, actually it should work with any Smartcard). Today I had to wait a bit and decided to convert the CLI application that talks to the firmware to a GUI application. I did this by running the CLI part in a QThread and using QMetaObject::invokeMethod to callback to my GUI. I…
In general QPixmap is the class I dislike the most in the Qt graphics stack. It is not because it did anything wrong, or has annoying bugs. It is merely that painting on a QPixmap can produce a huge slowdown. Maybe it is even the immediate painting model I dislike so much. In theory the QPixmap should represent the graphics memory and in theory painting this to another piece of graphics memory should be very fast. But reality is different,…
QT_QPA_PLATFORM_PLUGIN_PATH, QT_QPA_PLATFORM and QT_QPA_FONTDIR variables are used by QApplication/QPA to find the plugin. They are also available as arguments but there is no help entry for them (Qt5 needs some polishing). When building a plugin and Qt insists to tell you that the plugin is not there, you are likely to have some undefined symbols, the best hint is to build your plugins with -Wl,–no-undefined in the linker line. Obviously we should plan to use dlerror to also report why…
Let me share some notes on how Embedded Linux programming can be, if you decide the war/pain is over. We do this by looking at the desktop build and then look at the tons of stuff that you need for embedded programming. Desktop $ pkg-config –cflags libpng12…$ qmake && make… Embedded$ . /usr/local/angstrom/arm/environment$ pkg-config –cflags libpng12..…$ qmake-qt4 && make Where is the difference?There is little, you just use a cross compiler. The GNU/Linux Toolchain is prepared for cross compilation, pkg-config…