After a month of banging my head on the ICS camera, I can safely say it’s getting very close.  NOT DONE, but close.  And trust me, when it’s ready — I’ll announce it to everyone by every means possible.  You will know.

WHAT TO EXPECT DURING THE DROID 3 CM9 BETA?

For the next phase I want to take on various phone features while cleaning up the bugs in the build (mostly audio routing related).  Stuff like:
- Dock Audio
- HDMI output
- And support for both the XT860 and XT883 as smaller sub-patches to be done after flashing the main CM9 .zip

XT860 Status: XDA-user Rick#2 has already gotten the XT860 to run ICS w/ 3G data, and I’ll be using his work to do the XT860 patch.  For now you can download his entire .zip of Alpha #5 with working 3g here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1465297

XT883 Status: I need the same thing done for the XT883.  That patch should probably contain a build.prop and RIL binaries at the very least.

BLOG CLEANUP

The site has REALLY taken a beating over the last 2 versions of CM and several releases of Safestrap.  The comments on each page have grown quite long, and most are out-dated.

So, over the next few days I’m going to restructure the blog to cleanup each of the pages.  Some of them will disappear entirely and/or be combined together, while other pages will have all of the comments cleared out.

IN SHORT:
- Camera is getting close, so watch for the incoming beta sometime in the next week.
- Don’t be surprised when the comments and some of the pages on the blog disappear or get merged.
- Expect to see some cool stuff in the Beta.

PS. IT’S NOT PERSONAL!  IF I DELETE YOUR COMMENT AND YOU WANT TO REPOST IT, PLEASE DO.

I know many of you are wondering: “How is the ICS camera coming?”

Well, here’s the update (I posted this on XDA and felt that maybe it was worth putting her as well).

Few days ago, I completely stripped out the dev/ion references from the camera code and was starting to work through a rewrite using our version of the memory tiler built into the kernel (TI memmgr1.0) However, that caused some instability in the system which you can see in Alpha #4 at times. Also, it hung the media_audio service out on the boot up which is why it’s taking so long to boot currently.

Today, I reverted all of those changes, and instead built a ion_driver kernel module. The /dev/ion device is the ICS interface for Android to work with the memory tiler at the kernel level. The module includes an update to the tiler / dmm driver source as well (i named them tiler2 and tiler2_dmm).  In the kernel module, all of the ion driver tiler calls are directed to the new tiler2 interface instead of the original one built into our kernel.

Right now I’m testing / debugging those modules.

If loaded on system boot, tiler2_dmm.ko, and tiler2.ko modules load fine.

But, I’m working through some missing references on the ion_driver.ko module.

I’ll know more in a day or so as I debug it, as to whether this technique will work.

Worst case: I’ll have to re-write the tiler2 portion as a wrapper of our existing tiler instead of a whole new device as it is now.

TL;DR: Camera needs the /dev/ion device (as does a few codecs) I’m working on a kernel module solution at the moment which has some bugs