[OLPC-devel] Re: Probably the easiest way to get LinuxBIOS flashed...

[David Zeuthen]

On Wed, 2006-08-16 at 16:26 -1000, Mitch Bradley wrote:
> > 1) download this OLPC fedora image.
> > 2) md5 and check the checksum of that file.
> > 3) dd onto disk or flash key.
> > 4) make partition bootable. 
> >       (this can be "interesting" on flash keys, as I remember...).
> >   
> If you dd the image onto the whole flash device, the partition map will 
> be part of the image, so the bootable bit will go along for the ride.

Correct.

> > 5) boot the disk or flash key.

Steps 1. - 5. have been working for a long time...

> > 6) run the SPI flash update utility
> > 7) power cycle the machine 
> >
> > Then we can continue into the "install onto internal NAND flash" part of
> > the process.

That too should be trivial. I've requested a feature in nandwrite from
Woodhouse so it can read from stdin. Then the NAND flashing part of it
is trivial; something like

  modprobe msr
  olpc_enable_nand
  modprobe nand_ids
  modprobe nand_ecc
  modprobe nand
  modprobe mtdblock
  modprobe mtdchar
  modprobe cs553x_nand
  modprobe zlib_deflate
  modprobe jffs2
  flash_eraseall -j /dev/mtd0
  wget -O - http://olpc.download.redhat.com/olpc/streams/development/latest/images-rpm/olpc-development-rpm-jffs2.img |nandwrite -p /dev/mtd0 -

to avoid having the NAND image on the bootable ext3 image on the USB
image [1]. 

We can do this right now, but it only leaves us with 12MB free space and
I expect our distribution to grow a bit. We could also bump the ext3
size to 1GB and simply include the NAND image embedded in it.. depends
on how big peoples USB fob's are...

Also maybe ask the user what build he want to download instead of using
the "latest" symlink. Or perhaps introduce a "stable" symlink that
matches what we classify as stable builds (e.g. tested and verified to
work) as per

 http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Build_images

> > Does this seem like a reasonable plan?

Yup.

    David

[1] : The ext3 space usage is already way bigger than jffs2 due to no
compression. Here are some figures obtained with "df --si"

 build70 on ext3:  316M
 build70 on jffs2: 169M