[OLPC-devel] Re: buildrom issues

[Ronald G Minnich]

Marcelo Tosatti wrote:

> Yeah, I thought that using shell scripts would be easier, lets see
> whether thats feasible. How does your approach looks like? Can you post
> it?
> 

it's very traditional. It's a /linuxrc that brings the node up and drops 
you into /bin/ash. The linuxrc does a lot, but at the end, you're at a 
command prompt, and have a lot of flexibility to do what you need to do 
-- including figuring out what's gone wrong :-)

I was going to test it, but I can not for the life of me get an initrd 
to build and work if I select busybox as part of 'buildrom' Config.mk. 
At a minimum I've had to turn off wireless tools -- they just won't 
build at all.

For the boot step, it's weird. error is the dreaded 'cannot open root 
device ram0'. I've put a full dev in initrd-fs that works fine on other 
test cases for me under qemu ... the whole thing is puzzling me to the 
point that I am just now working out the error. The initrd is only 256k, 
which is good, however. This includes ash and a lot of tools.

Another weird thing is that if I enable busybox, mkelfimage won't build, 
as some shell script is broken at that point. I clearly need to do more 
digging than I have done here.

I think the build step of 'busybox' is broken at the top level. That 
might be the real cause of all this.

[[[btw ... qemu .... wonderful for testing this stuff]]]


> We're going to post a documented process on how to copy Fedora to the
> flash device and boot it from there with kexec.

Right, that's good stuff, I am just struggling with the linuxbios-only 
scenario, and have yet to find some combination of these tools that 
works. I am on FC4, and there seem to be some issues with building 
busybox + uclibc when it's not static. The errors I get make no sense to me.



ron