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

[Dan Williams]

On Wed, 2006-08-23 at 04:16 -0500, Richard Smith wrote:
> 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.

Are you using sumtool to convert the image to a JFFS2+summary image?
(which mounts in 1/10th the time that a normal JFFS2 image does).  If
not, you should be.

http://mailman.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2006-August/001346.html
http://mailman.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2006-August/001349.html

Dan

> - 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.
>