[OLPC-devel] Minutes from System Software telecon, 2006-08-22

[Richard Smith]

On 8/22/06, Marcelo Tosatti <mtosatti at redhat.com> wrote:

> By default the progress bar moves until its end, when a blank screen
> welcomes the user for undetermined amount of time (being picky,
> nevermind :)). Is that supposed to happen?

Doesn't happen for me.

> With latest buildrom (cs553x_nand enabled) I'm able to enter the shell
> (X icon), cd to /bin/, execute ./boot-nand and watch it go!

I had a much more frustrating experience. But I _almost_ have a
completely working nand boot.  I got far enough that I'm satisified
that it can mount the NAND and boot a kernel.

linuxbios_rev_a_20060823-1 is tagged.  Mitch, binary coming your way.....

I'll spare rest of the 6 hour gory details but here's the summary.

- Redhat build ( I used 75) needs 'mknod /dev/mdt0 c 90 0' for flash to work

- Buildrom dependency info for olpcflash.c doesn't work right.

to reproduce do a touch olpcflash.c in the ./packages/olpcflash dir.

make SURE your olpcflash version is >= 0.2.1.  use 'olpcflash -h' to
see the verision.

- I'm stupid and forgot to rebuild my kernel.

- I can't seem to produce a jffs2 image that will boot without errors.
 The closest I got was a stream of stuff about the my sums being
messed up.  I did however boot the kernel off of NAND so it wasn't
totally broken.

- bootmenu needs the _keypad_ numbers pressed to pop up the boot screen.

If you muck up your nand flash enough where the system will mount it
but not boot all the way then your only option (other than hacking
linuxrc and reflashing) is to use bootmenu to boot USB first.  Thats
when its really handy to know to use the _keypad_ keys rather than the
'1234' keys above 'qwerty'.  As simple as that seems this was very
non-obvious to me until I started looking at the source.

-- 
Richard A. Smith