[OLPC-devel] LinuxBIOS and integrated system debug status (Friday night).

[Jim Gettys]

OK, here's where we stand after today's intensive debugging (Build 79).
  1) the Marvell wireless patch to LB does not appear to work, so the
Marvell wireless won't run from LinuxBIOS: the existing patch was known
to possibly be problematical.  This still would block many users from
conversion.
  2) If a flash key/disk running ext3 is not shutdown cleanly, LinuxBIOS
won't boot the file system.  This means you have to take the key or disk
and clean it on a different machine to reboot the machine. This is not a
blocker, but is sure irritating.
  3) after following the directions to install an image to flash
(uneventfully), the board I used will no longer boot anything; Samat saw
this problem a couple weeks ago and again tonight, but no one else had
reproduced it until I did. The machine says "Jumping to LinuxBIOS" on
the serial port and then does nothing.  Samat has seen this problem on a
different board tonight as well; it started working again after being
unplugged for a while (20 minutes). This smells like an uninitialized
register in the NAND flash, or some such problem. Not a blocker to a
release, as we can tell people not to install onto NAND until we find
and fix it.
  4) the current sugar in build 79 looks to not scale itself properly to
the 1024x768 resolution screen I chose for the default since that is the
most likely to "just work on everyone's screen" size.

On the good side:
  o We have installation directions, that are now pretty good.  Whether
they are good enough for non-native speakers of English to follow is not
yet known.
  o We determined that FC6 and Ubuntu Edgy cannot successfully build a
ROM image; the resulting image hangs long into the boot sequence.  FC5
and Ubuntu Dapper can build an image reliably.  So we'll stop beating
our heads on this wall for the moment.  Half of today was lost on this
one.
  o The system now comes up 1024x768x16 at 60hz all the way into Sugar,
using the Jordan's EXA driver.  The EXA driver runs x11perf without
problems: rendercheck reports some problems.

I don't think we're quite ready to ship this one yet. Close, very, very,
very close, but not quite.  1) and 2) are the (potential) blockers.  I'd
probably settle for the Marvell working, and live with the mount problem
temporarily.  We can tell people not to use the NAND until we track it
down. The sugar problem is pretty minor.

Presuming we get 1) (and maybe 2) fixed, I'd like at least 3 more people
who have *never* installed LinuxBIOS to do the installation and vet the
instructions, before inviting more wholesale conversion.

Thanks for everyone for their hard work.  This is making good progress,
even if not quite as fast as we'd like.
                          Regards,
                                 - Jim
-- 
Jim Gettys
One Laptop Per Child