Ouya is a 99$ Tegra3 based gaming console without a display.

My goal is to use Ouya in my robotics project for video encoding but first I want to have Debian running there with hardware accelerated X.Org, OpenGL ES and video.

I now have the Debian running but with a few bigger issues that I’ll describe shortly. If you want to try it out, you can find my instructions for creating the rootfs in github. That might void the warranty even though the kernel is booted from RAM and the rootfs mounted from USB stick so the Ouya software should remain intact.

Ouya is easily brickable permanently, so you need to be careful not to flash anything there and you’ll be doing it at your own risk.

About the Issues.

HDMI

2013-09-05: HDMI works now with multiple resolutions and is not so picky about having the cable connected already on boot.

Ouya display kernel driver is hardcoded to use HDMI as the primary display with 1920×1080 resolution. That works relatively well as long as you keep your monitor/TV always on. I couldn’t get anything but black if I e.g. switched my monitor to another input and back.

I tried to enable the normal behaviour in the display driver and by disabling the LVDS in xorg.conf but the TV remains black and doesn’t seem to change the resolution. Maybe there is still something hardcoded in the display driver or maybe the driver is trying to enable the non-existent internal panel and gets confused.

Audio

2013-09-11: Got audio working with a simple asound.conf. I also run /etc/init.d/alsa-utils stop but unsure if that affected anything.

aplay -l lists HDMI as the first device and tegrawm8903 as the second. If I make the tegrawm8903 the default the audio plays but only from the left speaker and half the speed.

I don’t know if this is related to the HDMI problems above or if I should just have the correct ALSA mixer configuration.

Video

2013-09-05: Totem has configurable video sink: gconftool-2 -s /system/gstreamer/0.10/default/videosink nvxvimagesink –type=string

Hardware accelerated video decoding and rendering is supported through GStreamer. Currently videos play well with playbin2 as long as the audio is disabled with audio-sink=fakesink and the correct video sink is selected with video-sink=nvximagesink.

Maybe the GStreamer’s autovideosink should be patched to use nvxvimagesink instead of xvimagesink to make nvxvimagesink the default in applications using playbin2

Power

2013-09-05: CPUfreq with ondemand governor is working and enabled in the kernel nby default now.

CPU core hot-plugging works but switching to the low power core seems to lead to a kernel bug (arch/arm/mach-tegra/pm.c:509). Same bug seems to happen with ondemand CPUFreq governor. I haven’t really tried to get those working yet but both of them are working with Nexus7 so maybe it’s possible to get them working on Ouya as well.

If you want to test Debian on Ouya, you can find the needed blobs from my /tmp but I might set up something more appropriate later.