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

[Marcelo Tosatti]

Hi DavidZ,

On Wed, Aug 16, 2006 at 11:11:16PM -0400, David Zeuthen wrote:
> 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 -

Are you running sumtool on olpc-development-rpm-jffs2.img per dwmw2 suggestion? (for
faster mount time):

sumtool -n -p -e 128KiB -i `echo $IMAGE | sed -e s/ext3/jffs2/` -o `echo $IMAGE | sed -e
s/ext3/jffs2-sum/`

> 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...

Do we have a script for image generation already?

On the Fedora packaging side of things, we probably want to make an RPM
for buildrom and another for olpcflash, right?

> 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
>