Roadmap

This section contains new projects planned with Gemstone and their completion stages. To contribute by taking part in the relevant projects, visit their Github pages or community forums.

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Apache Nuttx&PX4

Pixhawk Flight Controller hardware mostly contains STM32 with Cortex-M architecture. The autopilot named PX4 runs on the real-time operating system named Apache Nuttx and does not have support for Texas AM67a. This project aims to run Apache Nuttx and PX4 on the Cortex-R5 cores found on T3-GEM-O1 development boards. The current status and pending tasks are in the table below.

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ChibiOS + Ardupilot

The Ardupilot autopilot currently runs on Linux on the T3 Gemstone O1 development board, that is, on the Cortex-A53 cores. However, for real-time and low-latency flight control, it is preferable to run the autopilot on dedicated cores without the overhead of a general-purpose operating system. ChibiOS, the primary real-time operating system supported by Ardupilot, is widely used on flight controller boards. This project aims to port the ChibiOS operating system to the Cortex-R5 cores on the AM67a SoC and to run Ardupilot as an autopilot on top of ChibiOS on these cores. This way, while the Linux running on the Cortex-A53 cores handles general-purpose tasks, the real-time flight control loop can run uninterrupted on the Cortex-R5 cores. The current status and pending tasks are in the table below.

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Buildroot

Support for Gemstone will be added to Buildroot, a Linux build system with a somewhat lighter structure compared to the Yocto Project. The goal is for a person downloading buildroot to see T3-GEM-O1 as a board in the official buildroot system, and to be able to compile the appropriate image type and flash it onto their development board.

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Wayland Transition

The GPU (IMG BXS4-64) driver provided by TI for the AM67A SoC cannot accelerate X11 desktop environments. Windows are currently rendered without hardware acceleration using the CPU (llvmpipe). This causes the desktop environment to run sluggishly. The same driver includes acceleration support for Wayland. The goal is to transition to a Wayland-supported desktop environment that is stable, low on resource usage, feature-rich, and suitable for the majority of users.

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Linux Kernel Version 7

The goal is to run Linux kernel version 7 on the T3-GEM-O1 development board, instead of the currently used 6.12 version. This will allow taking advantage of new hardware drivers, improvements, and bug fixes.

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Non-RT Linux Kernel Selection

All images distributed within the Gemstone ecosystem currently ship with a PREEMPT_RT kernel, that is, a kernel with the real-time patches applied. This kernel makes interrupt latencies predictable for applications that must respond within defined time bounds, such as flight control, motor driving, and industrial communication. However, this becomes a disadvantage for projects that do not need real-time behaviour. Because locking mechanisms behave differently and interrupts are handled in separate threads on a real-time kernel, additional system-wide overhead is introduced. This causes latency and performance loss in compute-oriented workloads such as image processing, machine learning, and compilation, as well as in overall data throughput. The goal of this work is to make the kernel selectable by the user. This way, projects that require real-time behaviour can use the PREEMPT_RT kernel, while projects that do not can use the standard (non-RT) kernel without sacrificing performance.

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Gemstone Distro

Currently, the kernel, bootloader, and firmware used in the ecosystem are built through Yocto for educational purposes. Subsequently, images are produced by combining them with various versions of Pardus, Ubuntu, and Debian distributions. The goal is to change this approach and produce an independent distribution called Gemstone Distro by compiling all core software—such as the Kernel, Drivers, U-Boot, and Firmware without Yocto, and porting the latest Ubuntu version. While the Gemstone Image Writer application includes distributions like Ubuntu, Pardus, and Debian with their own interfaces and desktop environments, Gemstone Distro will feature entirely its own interfaces. It is also possible to transition to image-building systems that compile using web-based CI/CD tools instead of systems like Devbox, Taskfile, and Distrobox.

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Zenoh

The Eclipse Zenoh Pico project runs on various MCUs with low resource consumption requirements. As stated in the official code repository, it has been adapted for boards such as Arduino, STM32, and ESP. However, there is no known adaptation work available for the AM67A Cortex R5 architectures found on the T3 Gemstone O1. The aim of this work is to enable the zenoh-pico project to work together with lwIp on the AM67A Cortex-R5, to remove dynamic memory usage and implement static memory adaptation, and to make it usable as a library, thereby creating a pull request to the official code repositories by specifying T3 Gemstone O1 compatibility. The following steps will be carried out by examining the MCU section of the documentation and the Examples repository.