OpenFirmware and Linux v5.0 on XO-1.75

[James Cameron]

Thanks, very good progress.  Here's what I've done;

- reviewed the aggregate change from master branch, and each commit,

- built the firmware on my xo-4 build server, flashed an xo-1.75 c2
  sku200x2; it boots fine the old kernel from arm-3.0-wip branch, with
  some unimportant problems like keymapping,

- on the fedora 18 root filesystem, installed the 5.0.0
  kernel{-core,-modules,} with --nodeps and --force,

- adjusted boot/ so that olpc.fth runs the 5.0.0 kernel,

- booted it a few times trying to fix the missing root filesystem;
  more work needed, the device name may have changed and i've not
  found a way to find what it is, or it isn't being detected; serial
  console doesn't work even with console=ttyS2,115200, and the
  keyboard is unresponsive in the dracut shell.

My mind has bitrotted.

On your interest in building on x86_64, suggestions;

- there are six 0.1" pitch pads on the back of the PCB which expose
  the SPI Flash chip pins, so you can hook a programmer to them, but
  check the voltage levels; some units used 1.8V chips, most used
  3.3V.

- build a composite image by hand using the cforth you know already
  works, and the openfirmware built on x86_64,

- use binary comparison of the .rom file to make sure the cforth
  section hasn't changed much; if it hasn't, probably good to go, but
  if it has, no idea.

On Thu, Feb 21, 2019 at 11:54:15AM +0100, Lubomir Rintel wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> for the past few days I've been looking into updating the XO-1.75
> OpenFirmware so that it's good enough to boot mainline Linux.
> 
> It now looks usable enough: the essentials such as simple framebuffer,
> keyboard, Wi-Fi or USB all seem to work.
> 
> The branch's pretty large; counting 60 commits at the moment. Get it
> from:
> 
>   git pull https://github.com/lkundrak/openfirmware lr/olpc-xo175-1
> 
> It's not done or finished (see the TODOs in many commits). Some
> bindings are not settled in Linux tree. Howerver I still think it may
> be a good idea to share it early to get some feedback and identify bits
> that obviously stink.
> 
> I've tested it with the latest Fedora kernel [1] build (yay!) and also
> booted the latest OLPC OS release. When booting the latter, there were
> no differencies in "find /sys/devices -type d |sort" output, so I
> assume the drivers that would use the device tree (there probably
> aren't many) bind just fine.
> 
> [1] https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=1214041
> 
> I tried not to break other boards. olpc/4.0 still builds fine, but is
> likely to end up with three clock nodes (/pmua, /apbc and /clocks).
> olpc/3.0 was bitrotten before and I did not try doing x86 build, for
> the most part I've been building natively on the XO-1.75.
> 
> For a x86_64 hosted build I needed to patch cforth. See [2]. The 
> MitchBradley/cforth [1] master branch actually takes a similar
> approach, but there the 1.75 support there seems severely bitrotten.
> 
> [2] https://github.com/lkundrak/cforth/commit/c88790fd32.patch
> [3] https://github.com/MitchBradley/cforth
> 
> I didn't have the guts to actually flash and run the image built on
> x86_64. I don't not seem to be able to program the spi flash by
> attaching a soic8 clip to it, without unsoldering the chip and I don't
> feel like doing that if I fuck things up.
> 
> At some point I'll hopefully follow up with something that could be
> actually merged into the OpenFirmware, perhaps in a month or so. Until
> then some more bindings may settle.
> 
> In particular, my hopes are that some of Armada DRM or EC may make it
> into 5.1. Camera works, but needs some more love, perhaps 5.2.
> 
> Take care
> Lubo
> 

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.netrek.org/