[OLPC-devel] Re: LinuxBIOS update status

[David Zeuthen]

On Mon, 2006-08-21 at 22:13 -0400, Ivan Krstić wrote:
> Hey folks,
> 
> I just poked around a bit; we're currently blocking on a couple of
> things before we can release instructions for upgrading to LinuxBIOS.
> 
> - OLPC Fedora build 59, marked 'last stable', doesn't contain fbdev and
> the requisite bits that LinuxBIOS is counting on, so we need a more
> recent stable build to actually upgrade.

We don't mark builds as stable until we're happy with them. 

This includes booting off the targets we want to support

 - USB image @ devboard with Insyde BIOS
 - NAND image @ devboard with Insyde BIOS, booting via USB and kexec'ing
   into a kernel loaded from NAND (select OLPC NAND in grub on the USB
   stick)
 - qemu image

now our criterion also includes 

 - USB image for devboard with LinuxBIOS

and at some point it will include

 - NAND flash image for devboard with LinuxBIOS


> - David, can you brief us on where your machine currently stands? If I
> understand correctly, you've successfully flashed it with LinuxBIOS, but
> don't have it giving a usable VGA signal (is it expecting the DCON to be
>  there?), so you can only use it through ssh. Is this accurate? How long
> will this take to fix?

I was able to follow the instructions on the Wiki and have had no
VGA/DCON signals except with a ROM sent to me by Jordan. I haven't tried
since Friday though.

The blocker right now is that the BIOS freaks out when trying to boot
USB. It mounts the image but when the linuxrc script (or one of it child
scripts) run /usr/bin/[ busybox says "Memory Exhausted". I've tried to
work on this but got nowhere - it's not really my area of expertise. So
I'm kinda waiting for that to get fixed. It's block marking a build as
stable...

However.. it does work... the BIOS, after freaking out, will drop you to
a shell on the UART and you can then manually do the following
". /key/boot/olpc-boot.sh" and we boot just fine. This works IIRC with
build72 or build73. The images needs some fixing as to choose the right
X driver (we just use fbdev(4) which works with both vesafb and gxfb)
but by and large we start X and things work.

    David