[OLPC-devel] Re: Minutes: BIOS teleconference Wednesday Evening Boston Time.

[Marcelo Tosatti]

Hi,

Welcome, Mitch!

On Wed, Aug 02, 2006 at 05:08:57PM -1000, Mitch Bradley wrote:
> Minutes for OLPC BIOS meeting, 2006-08-02, taken by Mitch Bradley
> 
> This meeting was split out from a meeting that occurred on 2006-08-02.
> 
> 
>  Agenda
>  ======
>  Please send me any items to add to the list.  These occur to me as
>  topics we should start working through, get owners for and get closed.
>  It is a long list; we'll have to be disciplined to get through it.
> 
> We really want to do LZMA compression, which would be even better.

The idea is to have LinuxBIOS support LZMA compression, although Linux
could do that by itself (BTW, I fail to see the advantage of having
LinuxBIOS support LZMA instead of the kernel).

Carl-Daniel has been working on it (accordingly to him ETA to start that
LinuxBIOS LZMA work is 3 weeks from now).

> Close to having install onto FLASH from a USB key.  Need to:
> a) Install LinuxBIOS into FLASH.
> b) Install Linux onto NAND FLASH.

b) is already done... and a) is pretty close, too (see olpcflash related
threads on olpc-devel).

> ** Kernel code base:
> 
> Suggestion: Let's go with kernel.org and use truncated config.
> 
> Can't kexec Fedora kernels.

We're looking into that...

> ** How to archive corresponding TinyLinux patches?
> 
> Need to check patch set versus .18 to see what has gone upstream.

Richard Smith did regenerate -tiny patches for recent kernel trees...

Richard, I lost your mail, could you resend that CC olpc-devel?

> ** Compression status / TCP/IP stack status / wireless install?
> 
> Kernel mods for LZMA are available.  LZMA seems to do better than gzip
> for executables.  Saves ~190K.  May buy us enough for TCP stack.
> Fallback is to put the TCP stuff as a separate module in NAND FLASH.
> 
> We need to draw the line soon so we can freeze for the beta build.
> 
> AI (Jim and Ray): Write a boot requirements document.  Ray will write draft,
> Jim will review.

Any news on this?

> ** Is mem= needed? Jordan thinks yes.
> 
> Ron: I think it's only needed due to a bug in the driver or the way the 
> kernel comes up. I have no objection to it.

More details please?

> ** Can we autodetect memory size/flash size?
> 
> Ron: yes in both cases, at what point in bootup do you wish to do this?
> 
> 
> ** User interface.
> 
> Ron: Not sure which UI you mean  :-)
> 
> 
> ** Requirements to make production as fast/cheap/easy as possible.
> 
> Ron: we have to pick the usb->enet dongle so we can start testing it.