The final FatdogArm porting article
Final article of the FatdogArm porting series, about optimising your build and making use of available SoC/platform features. Since these are usually highly-platform-specific, the article has less depth and others and instead try to provide the bird's eye view of the available strategies.It is a difficult subject as well because many times the information required to use the platform/SoC fully is not available (or only available under NDA); and anyone who is "outside" of the circle and still wishes to use them must do the hard-work of "reverse-engineering" to figure out how to write the drivers for them --- for this, I cheers and salute many of reverse-engineering teams from linux-sunxi (and many others - the Lima graphics, nouveau teams) whose unending efforts have provided the rest of us with usable drivers for devices which otherwise can only act as resistors.
Although this is supposedly the final article, I may expand and revise the series as the need arise or when new information are revealed. But for now, this is the end.
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Comments:
Posted on 1 Sep 2013, 13:13 by 01micko"pandora"
Ok... so I'll bite and try to compile a kernel for pandora.
Reading Pandora Wiki it looks possible to compile 3.4x with the omap2_defconfig, patch for AUFS and configure it as builtin.. I don't think I'll bother with f2fs. I'm not impressed with it, especially the penalty paid for space. Any speed advantage is offset by this IMHO.
Pandora uses uImage and the boot.cmd looks like it will be adaptable of course with the correct address, which I'll have to research.
Video might be interesting since it is equipped with powerVR SGX GPU. I suppose fb will do for now until I get it up and running and do some more research into the driver.
Might take me a while as I am busy with other stuffs too
. At least pandora can come out of it's box!Delete
Posted on 1 Sep 2013, 13:34 by 01micko
"re pandora"
Well pandor'a git kernel is at 3.2.45, I should use that as there is no ther patching needed, already patched for AUFS but their config is like this:
3095 CONFIG_AUFS_FS=m
3096 CONFIG_AUFS_BRANCH_MAX_127=y
3097 # CONFIG_AUFS_BRANCH_MAX_511 is not set
3098 # CONFIG_AUFS_BRANCH_MAX_1023 is not set
3099 # CONFIG_AUFS_BRANCH_MAX_32767 is not set
3100 CONFIG_AUFS_SBILIST=y
3101 # CONFIG_AUFS_HNOTIFY is not set
3102 # CONFIG_AUFS_EXPORT is not set
3103 CONFIG_AUFS_RDU=y
3104 # CONFIG_AUFS_PROC_MAP is not set
3105 # CONFIG_AUFS_SP_IATTR is not set
3106 # CONFIG_AUFS_SHWH is not set
3107 # CONFIG_AUFS_BR_RAMFS is not set
3108 # CONFIG_AUFS_BR_FUSE is not set
3109 CONFIG_AUFS_BR_HFSPLUS=y
3110 CONFIG_AUFS_BDEV_LOOP=y
3111 # CONFIG_AUFS_DEBUG is not set
Should be ok if I mimic the mele config for AUFS.
Cheers!
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Posted on 1 Sep 2013, 17:12 by jamesbond
"I was just about to ask you"
I was just about to ask you about the Pandora
. I checked Pandora's site last night, and it seems that there are a few models, I'm not sure which one you've got. Too bad it's so expensive; otherwise I may be interested to get one too :(
Anyway, to make things simple make sure that you've got most of the filesystem drivers are built-in (at the very least: squashfs, aufs, vfat, ext2/3/4); if you don't then you need to have these modules in /lib/modules inside the initrd itself. Of course, if you boot from USB or SD Card then you may want to get drivers for them built-in too.
Here's my A10 kernel config.
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Posted on 1 Sep 2013, 21:25 by 01micko
"pandora model"
It's the 1 GHZ version fortuitously.
Shame my bandwidth is do slow.. kernel (uncompressed from git) is coming down at 16k and u-boot at 8k
. Won't be anything on that front happening tonight!Delete
Posted on 2 Sep 2013, 17:18 by 01micko
"getting there"
Far easier than I thought but with caveats!
I have it booting but I'm getting an AUFS error. I'll go over it soon.
Ha, I built U-boot, x-loader.. waste of time, pandora has a boot menu when you insert the sd card and hold the right shoulder button. Oh well.. more later and when I get time I'll document on my blog! If I get reasonable success I'll make an image, or maybe wait until FD-A becomes "stable".
Cheers!
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Posted on 3 Sep 2013, 22:45 by 01micko
"edit pandora model"
I wasn't entirely thinking straight (had a bout of flu last week), it's the "rebirth", which is omap3 @ 600MHz, 512 MB RAM. I had the omap3 part right all along just not the clock! FD-A still seems to run at good speed though. Once I fix the input devices it will be quite nice to use.
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Posted on 3 Sep 2013, 23:02 by jamesbond
"Re Pandora"
Mick, WOW !!
I'm glad that it still works OK at 600Mhz. I suppose the determinating factor is probably the RAM then.
Overall Pandora does seem like a nice machine to play with.
My next moves for FatdogArm now is to try to squash all the bugs. The "lib64" in /etc/profile is one of them
, please do report if you find more :)
Take care Mick, I had one that lasted three weeks and I can tell you it wasn't fun at all.
cheers!
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