Coding Eye-Candy for Portable Linux Devices

At ACCESS, I've had the opportunity to do interesting things with Linux on cell phones. Some modern ARM chips, such as the Marvell XScale and TI OMAP series, have unusual frame buffer architectures that let you do "eye candy" on the cheap, without requiring a GPU.

In July 2008, I presented a paper about this work at the Ottawa Linux Symposium. I was also supposed to give it at GUADEC in Istanbul, but wasn't able to attend, so David "Lefty" Schlesinger gave it for me there.

If you are interested, here are links to:

• The paper itself, which is somewhat academic in tone
  
• The PowerPoint presentation based on the paper, which is more informal
  
• A movie showing this in action on an XScale-based Zylonite prototype system, with narration by yours truly
  

As of the date of this post, I'm in the middle of porting this system to an OMAP 3430-based system.