[Samsung Gear 2] biktor_gj:
Hey mate, got an hour today to play again, now I have more or less clear most of the things we need to do. As you guys can see I'm not having much time lately to do anything, can't even find time to reply here, so all developer help would be very appreciated to keep things moving a little faster.

Now, to the point:

1. Audio HAL: Nothing precompiled is going to work. I have a plan, but it will take time, and I don't know if I'll be able to achieve it. As some of you might know, I tried to use the following binary blobs to make sound work on the watch:

a) Gear 1 (library too old, same device)

b) KMiniLTE (library won't run due to missing ril, wouldn't work anyway as I've found later that it doesn't use the same chipset)

c) Galaxy S2 audio library (fails to load on the very first routine, IOCTL fails on the start function). Galaxy S2 uses YMU823.

Digging into the opensource tar package, I found the source code for the sound scenario on the Yamaha YMU831 for Tizen. Those scenario are also on the Gear1 images, and I think are what are used to modify the audio input/output on the DSP, set volume, etc.

handle = HwdevOpen();
if (handle >= 0) {
nResult = ioctl(handle, YMC_IOCTL_SET_CTRL, &args);
if (nResult < 0)
pa_log_error("ioctl YMC_IOCTL_SET_CTRL has failed with %s", strerror(errno));
HwdevClose(handle);
} else {
pa_log_error("HwdevOpen failed, ret handle is %d, err is %s", handle, strerror(errno));
}
ReleaseFileData(&Parameter);

So I have some reference code that opens the hardware device, picks the scenarios and pushes them to the DSP. I will try to build a new library from scratch based on TinyAlsa, the YMU823 code and the reference audio hal implementation.

2. Power management: I got to remove the PMQoS driver entirely. Unfortunately, it has been a useless effort. The screen still goes off on battery, don't know why, and battery doesn't last a day without it. So that will stay as it was. The screen corruption that happens when running on battery comes from the display not waking up correctly when that setting is enabled. All those functions run correctly independently, but when the screen is set to always on, some other kernel function is telling the screen to shut down before the framebuffer driver is ready, making it crash. At some point I'll find the code and I will kill it. :(

3. HWComposer: Aeris Weather makes the mixed opengl watchface work because it inserts another layer into the frame composition process. As the hwcomposer is closed source and I didn't succeed in building one myself, I will hold on to that until we get the lolipop release for the KMini lte. If we're a bit lucky, Samsung will clean up their stupid mess and things will work a bit better. At least I know it doesn't come from the kernel, so GPU driver should be good as it is.

4. Screen brightness: I played with it a bit. It doesn't work because it doesn't exist. I will explain, the kernel has two different drivers for the display, one is the DRM variant used in Tizen, and the other one is what we're using, which is half built. They are different and not compatible. I spent some time looking at both of them and the driver from the Gear1, which uses the same screen and also uses the S3C Framebuffer driver. Then there's the second part of the story, which is the brightness functions are only called when the display is blanked, so the selector in android is not working either. On one side the gamma table has to be ported from some other driver, and then I'll have to make a "lights" hal library to control it. The sysfs is there, so it might be the easier part of all te things left to be done

To all the people saying there's no progress, that development has stopped etc. We all have a life outside XDA, and sometimes you get more free time to do what you want to do, and sometimes you don't even find time to sleep more than 5 hours. The fact that things move faster or slower doesn't mean that people have abandoned the platform, it just means that a) nothing they've done has worked, b), they didn't have time to work on it, c) they weren't inspired and wanted to do something else for a while to clear their head. Telling people it's OK to offtopic in a development thread just because you don't see progress just degrades the thread and make people less inclined to post real development related stuff, so please, use the Q&A or the Genearl forum for that.