[OLPC-devel] Minutes from OLPC system software teleconference, 2006-08-29

[Mitch Bradley]

OLPC system software meeting. 2006-08-29
Richard, Jim, Mitch (scribe), Jordan, Chris Ball, Ivan, Marcello,
David Woodhouse

Ivan fixed trac!  Yay!

Kudos to everyone for nailing several blocker bugs, details below.

Mitch: The CaFe SD hardware differs quite a bit from the
publicly-available "Simplified SD Host Controller Spec".
Most of the data transfer registers are the same, but
there are widespread differences in the miscellaneous
registers that support such features as card presence
detection, power control, and clock control.

Dave Woodhouse has arrived in Santa Clara, will go
to Marvell on Wednesday.

Ticket #59 - wireless problem.  Jordan and Tom nailed it!  Yay!
Tested by Chris Ball and Richard.  It enumerated properly,
and Richard did a flood ping.  Going to ship a new version today.  

Ticket #55 - Ext3 file system not cleaned dismounted
Marcello: when kexec'ing a new kernel from USB FLASH,
we don't unmount it.  Olpc-boot.sh should copy it
to a new location and unmount prior to kexec.

The proposed solution is patch the LinuxBIOS kernel to
ignore the incompatible flag on a read-only mount.
This is more or less what grub already does.
Action item for Marcello to develop this patch.

Ticket #53: Jumping to LinuxBIOS hang:

Jordan and Tom found that the first byte written to RAM comes
out wrong.  Apparently you need a nonce write to RAM to stabilize
the PLLs.  Details in the trac log.

We aren't 100% sure that this is the same bug, but there's
an excellent chance.  The plan is to push out this fix, then
be on the lookout for more instances of the hang.

Marcello reports another problem with USB keys.  Unmount
root fs, reboot fails twice, then works the third time.
Somewhat repeatable.  Action item for Marcello to create
a trac ticket.

Action Item: David - enter a trac ticket on DCON problem
(presence of DCON tends to make USB flakier).

Action Item: Everybody!  When you see a problem - any problem - open up
a trac ticket.  Bugs R Us.  Every bug we find and fix now makes
thousands of users happier.

Marcello: why not just use bugzilla?  Resolution: we'll try trac
for another week, now that Ivan has improved it, and reevaluate
at next week's meeting.

Jordan: using FS2 on pre-A.  Can we add Quanta to add jtag headers to 
test-B boards?

AI: Jim to request JTAG headers on first thousand test-B boards.