rcn-ee.com

Talk about a weird wordpress bug, for the longest time, I could not edit/create any posts with 2.8.x. With an upgrade of 2.9.2 this morning everything is working again…

Quick updates from the last year…

Server move: due to space/bandwidth issues on rcn-ee.com. rcn-ee.net is currently hosting all beagleboard kernels for ubuntu & debian.

What is the beagle based kernel farm currently doing? Well Nothing at the moment according to: http://rcn-ee.homeip.net:81/dl/farm/log/

The Farm currently consists of:
Beagle Bx (musb testing)
Beagle C2 (gcc/kernel builds)
Beagle C4 (ehci testing)
Sheevaplug (kernel builds)

Kernel source has since moved to launchpad: https://code.launchpad.net/~beagleboard-kernel
Personal Goal is to get Ubuntu to build these next to the freescale and marvel *.deb’s…

Finally 2.6.33 has entered my 2.6-dev tree, in some ways it seems better then the 2.6.32 in the 2.6-stable tree, but it’s hard-locking when running the gcc test suite… I’m also working on adding igepv2 support to my builds, as i find the 512Mb of ram very usefull.

Some users will find this interesting: http://global.phoronix-test-suite.com/?k=profile&u=robertcnelson-3173-25135-22766

Ubuntu Side: Alpha-3 was just recently released for lucid, I’ve posted an image here: http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardUbuntu#Lucid_10.04_.28alpha-3.29

Note, to run lucid on any beagle based device, your defconfig MUST have these enabled:

CONFIG_ARM_ERRATA_430973=y
CONFIG_ARM_THUMBEE=y

and this non jaunty/karmic & lenny/squeeze compatible change:
CONFIG_DEVTMPFS=y
CONFIG_DEVTMPFS_MOUNT=y

Well, I’m off for San Jose again, this time, some fun, sun, and good wine…  So i’ll be away from irc, and email.

Flying again!  Heading to San Jose for a week of cortex training and a tan.  So I won’t be as active on the boards or irc.  Hopefully they took my advice, but I won’t know till i see the new demo boards.  Wish i had more time to see the sites, but I’m pretty booked as is.  Sorry Cousin, I didn’t know LA was 5-6 hours away…   BTW, the free wifi at GFK is nice, probably won’t check my email/messages in MSP due to the wifi prices.

With the release of Debian 5.0 (Lenny) I’ve added an additional chroot on the beagle builder; Squeeze, which will begin building shortly. To help new beagleboard users, here is the list of all currently supported kernel *.deb’s and their location.

Debian Lenny: http://www.rcn-ee.net/deb/kernel/beagle/lenny/
Debian Squeeze: http://www.rcn-ee.net/deb/kernel/beagle/squeeze/
Debian Sid: http://www.rcn-ee.net/deb/kernel/beagle/sid/

Ubuntu 9.04: http://www.rcn-ee.net/deb/kernel/beagle/jaunty/

MojoHandhelds 8.04: http://www.rcn-ee.net/deb/kernel/beagle/hasty/
(armv5 & armv6)

As a reminder all changes are logged here:
http://www.rcn-ee.net/deb/kernel/changes.txt

and a straightforward install script:
http://www.rcn-ee.net/deb/kernel/update_kernel.sh

So i finally figured out why i couldn’t login to my blog.  I had enabled a new plugin about a month ago, well that forced the login screen to just reload.  Renamed plugins to plugins.old and things are working again, now just to figure out why.

So as everyone in the beagleboard world has probably seen, ARM & Canonical have gotten together to bring the full Ubuntu Desktop OS to the ARMv7. (Hopefully they recognize Mojo-Handhelds excellent work…) Today I happened to noticed an early post by ogra on installing Ubuntu on the Omap35x. He provides an early root file system and an upstream lo kernel uImage.  Since it’s still very early, (just base level packages are built) I won’t provide complete instructions quite yet. (but for those that want to dig in and play, here’s a hint, SD-Card+deboostrap:repo:http://ports.ubuntu.com/jaunty/+QEMU )

As always kernel builds (along with a kernel deb for Jaunty in a few hours) based off of the Angstrom’s team excellent work are located here:
http://www.rcn-ee.com/deb/kernel/

and Changelog:
http://www.rcn-ee.com/deb/kernel/changes.txt
(edit: it’s probably useful for this to link to the valid file..)

So, I’m heading to Texas for another training, Grand Forks Airport is starting to feel like home… (Keil Software) However the flight is delayed due to rain or snow in msp. 

On the Beagleboard front, I noticed the Mojo Handheld guys had an icy-armv5el folder on their http server this morning, so i quickly setup a chroot on the beagle build server and built the standard kernel deb’s.  It’s untested, but considering much of icy release is based on future (lenny&sid)+armel (gcc-4.3.2) things should run very smoothly.

Uploads are here as always: http://www.rcn-ee.com/deb/icy/v2.6.27-2a3408b-oer4/

can’t wait for the icy-armv7-a release!

Well it took a couple more tweaks/fixes, but I now have a working script for auto building the BeagleBoard’s kernel deb package. (linux-image, linux-headers, and uImage). Update packages will be available here: http://www.rcn-ee.com/deb/lenny/ 

Script: Basicly, add patches to svn with patch order, update revision number, along with kernel git revision and run the script.  A patch diff & kernel source tar are generated on the file server.  Later an hourly run crontab job on the BeagleBoard detects this update, builds the target files and uploads them.  (Sure, some of these steps could also be done on the BeagleBoard, but with limited resources, wear leveling, etc (2GB/4GB SD cards) a file server works better.)

Since things are working, time to add features of course…

Goal: Add autobuild capabilties for Mojo Handhelds ubuntu port.  Using the same kernel version, just different build enviroments..

Idea #1: BeagleBoard running Debian Lenny, with NFS mount containing Lenny, Sid, Frisky-armv5el, etc chroot’s.
Con: NFS mount’s are rumored to be slow when building kernel’s.
Pro: NFS mount already setup on the fileserver, same script should also work for Idea #2

Idea #2: Idea #1, except with a usb<->pata drive.
Con: BeagleBoard is currently on the other side of the world, i fly home on saturday…

So we just got into Trondheim, here’s a couple pics while i go get more..

Sadly it just started raining but i got a couple off:

Hotel:

Port:

Didn’t I just do this a month or two ago?  Well anyways i’m in Amsterdam again, so early in the morning the sun still hasn’t come up.  I left Grand Forks about 11:00am saturday, had a good flight to msp and then another good one to Amsterdam.  My flight leaves for Trondheim Norway in a couple hours, (for those at home it’s 2:30 am Sunday and the sun’s finaly coming up.. so no sleep for me..)… We are staying at the SAS Radison downtown on the water front, so i should get some nice pictures… (sunrise is 7am/sunset is 7pm this time of year..)

On the beagleboard front (since i never post anything): I now have a beagleboard online autobuilding debian ‘lenny’ kernel packages, infact i just pushed an updated kernel config from the Amsterdam airport.   Now just to add an nfs mount and have it build mojo kernel packages too…