[OLPC-devel] 2316 revisions

Ronald G Minnich rminnich at lanl.gov
Sat Jun 10 19:43:41 EDT 2006


OK, I have committed Steve and Jordan's patches. My monitor is lighting 
up! My 2.6.14 tiny kernel is not doing well, so I am moving to Jordan's 
kernel. I have not tested on rumba, let's hope that we have not broken 
that platform, but I think I trust steve quite a bit on this code. I did 
go over it and it looks good to me ...

There are a few caveats here.

we're back to a 64k vsa. I have attached the 64k, nrv-compressed, olpc 
with softvga support. To use it,
cat olpc_vsa_softvga.bin.nrv.64k linuxbios.rom > flashimage.512k

then you can flash that.

Jordan was using an nrv-compressed linux payload and hand-patching in 
the command line (my fault on that, actually). We don't need to do that 
any more, and so I have turned CONFIG_COMPRESSED_ROM_STREAM OFF. You're 
going to need to use mkelfimage if you use the default olpc build in 
linuxbios. You're not going to need to set the command line, either by 
FS2 or by hand, any more.

Here is my command for setting up a kernel to boot from flash.

mkelfImage --command-line="console=ttyS0,115200 root=/dev/ram0 \ 
init=/sbin/init mem=128m"  linux-2.6.14-olpc/arch/i386/boot/bzImage \ 
bootidea
cp bootidea /tmp/olpcpayload.elf

I don't know if I need the mem=128m any more, but there is a lot to do, 
so I'm not worrying about it.

Note the cp to /tmp/olpcpayload.elf. The linuxbios build looks for that 
file. I know it seems hokey, but it's actually the easiest thing to do 
for a 'general user in the repository' path. you can roll your own 
config.lb with your own paths, if you wish.

If you want an initrd, and you have a big flash:
mkelfImage --command-line="console=ttyS0,115200 root=/dev/ram0 \ 
init=/sbin/init mem=128m" \ 
--initrd=/home/rminnich/src/amd/GX2/olpc-boot-loader/initramfs_data.cpio.gz 
  linux-2.6.14-olpc/arch/i386/boot/bzImage bootidea


I'd rather learn how to use initramfs at this point, but there it is for 
an initrd. I've not had great luck with initramfs yet, however.

You will need 1M flash for an initrd, most likely.

Any questions on how to do this, let me know.

Thanks to jordan and steve and tom and the great people at AMD for their 
fantastic work on this. It is very exciting to see that monitor light up!

thanks

ron
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