[OLPC-devel] Minutes of system software telecon, 2006-08-08

[Mitch Bradley]

System SW teleconference
8/8/2006

Present: Jim, Zephaniah, Richard, Mitch (scribe), Chris Blizzard, Ron


Things that are now working:

JFFS2

PS/2

Program PLCC Flash in-circuit (can now convert to LinuxBIOS on socketed 
flash)

udev-based system now waits for USB devices to be ready - nice in 
several respects

booting kernel from external usb drive, mounting NAND flash and booting 
kernel

Rev 2369 from tip of tree works.

Jordan said he has a version that doesn't need INT10.


Outstanding issues:

Still can't kexec() Fedora kernel

LinuxBIOS recipe for reFLASHing is a bit clunky.  You have to whack on 
an MSR.

We don't have a solid recipe for rewriting the SPI FLASH.  olpcflash utility
overwrites the EC code block.  Probably will be easy to fix, but hasn't been
fixed yet.  We need it for sure by end of September, but would like to have
it by end of August.

Need a software BOM.

How do we localize the image?  Need to consider the case of 2 languages
simultaneously installed.

Wireless - still don't have redistributable firmware.  Educating Marvell
about our requirements.  Wireless driver is not integrated upstream.  Until
Marcello can integrate it, we need to carry a patch or an RPM.

Bug #191931 - stuff that we need to do in the RedHat packages and kernel.

Analog in.  ALSA control is upstream, but we have to reintegrate hardware
specific code to tell the embedded controller to do the right thing.  
Trac # 42.

xv is badly broken in 16-bit mode.  Jordan is working on it.  Works in 
32-bit mode.


Input devices:

LinuxBIOS required for PS/2

Issue with HID hotplug vis a vis the X server.  Depends on XOrg.  Can we 
do it with
7.1 or must we wait for 7.2?  Do we need hotplug for the initial release?

GS sensor kernel driver basically working.  Having problem the other sensor.
Simultaneous mode doesn't work, probably because the hardware doesn't 
support
it yet.  The next build will support it (samples on the 31st?).

Camera - Jonathan Corbett is likely to be doing the camera driver.  He can't
be there for the FPGA bringup so Mitch may have to fill in.  Schedule says
9/06.

Discussion of partitioning to reduce JFFS initialization time.  IBM has 
a scheme
that can be used to do partitioning while retaining good wear leveling 
properties.
Booting process currently requires JFFS to be mounted twice, requiring 
~7 seconds per.


Beta build:

The low risk path for install is via a USB key.  Then rewrite the 
FLASHes from
scripts.

Jim has been doing scheduling exercises.


Action items:

Convert everybody to linuxBIOS
Get reFLASHing working for both parts
Audio issues per above
Find out if we need new AMD driver.
Figure out Xorg setup requirements
Need new RedHat kernel with gxfb (Dave Jones promised to help)