[OLPC-devel] Flash driver status.

[Marcelo Tosatti]

On Wed, May 17, 2006 at 01:50:32PM -0600, Ronald G Minnich wrote:
> Marcelo Tosatti wrote:
> 
> >Err.. What I meant is: how to program the board to execute the 512KB
> >flash instead of the Insyde code? 
> 
> it's gone man. There is no Insyde code. It's been replaced with 
> something faster ... better ... cheaper ... pick any three :-)
> 
> >
> >How are you testing LinuxBIOS? 
> 
> I reflash on the rumba and put it in the olpc. it's all linuxbios. We 
> bios hax0rs 0wn the platform from the first instruction :-)
> 
> It's a nice feeling ...

:))

> Also, I should tell you all that I've not had a linuxbios "failure to 
> boot" for the last 6 revs of svn. I think we're finally into that nice 
> state where there are things that need fixing, but the code is solid 
> enough that it's pretty good odds that when you burn a brand new 
> version, it will work. Thanks to Ollie, AMD, Steve Goodrich, Quanta, and 
> many others ...


Great!

> We're at the point where the issues are "how do we configure this 
> thang?". And the biggest issue is how to jam linux into a small space.
>
> btw, what I really want is to
> strip vmlinux
> compress vmlinux with something
> 
> but the code that makes the bzImage does an amazing job ... strip 
> doesn't strip as much as I'd like. Is there a better way?

The "objcopy -O binary" step which translates the vmlinux ELF to the raw 
vmlinux.bin binary (arch/i386/kernel/boot/) already does the strip:

[marcelo at dmt i386]$ cat boot/.vmlinux.bin.cmd
cmd_arch/i386/boot/vmlinux.bin := objcopy -O binary -R .note -R .comment
-S arch/i386/boot/compressed/vmlinux arch/i386/boot/vmlinux.bin

OBJCOPY(1):

       -S
       --strip-all
        Do not copy relocation and symbol information from the source file.

So I don't think there's much to do here...