Pandaboard kernel questions .....

[Bob Smith]

I am trying to come up to speed on the club reference board
and have some questions about it.....

- Has anyone successfully built and installed a new kernel?
If so, what web site did you follow?

- Has anyone been able to change the uInitrd initial RAM disk?
If so, what tool did you use to edit or create it?

- Has anyone gotten the kernel to boot while showing the whole
boot log on the serial port?
If so, how did you do this?

thanks
Bob Smith

[Dave Hylands]

Hi Bob,

On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 9:34 PM, Bob Smith <bsm...@linuxtoys.org> wrote:
> I am trying to come up to speed on the club reference board
> and have some questions about it.....
>
> - Has anyone successfully built and installed a new kernel?
>   If so, what web site did you follow?

What do you mean by a "new kernel"?

> - Has anyone been able to change the uInitrd initial RAM disk?
>   If so, what tool did you use to edit or create it?
>
> - Has anyone gotten the kernel to boot while showing the whole
>  boot log on the serial port?
>   If so, how did you do this?

It just does that by default.

I downloaded and installed the minimal image and the validation image.

Here's a link to the minimal FS
http://omappedia.org/wiki/Minimal-FS

Here's a link to the validation stuff:
http://pandaboard.org/node/13531/#debug

And, I was also able to build and boot using the SD Card image built
using this site:
http://hbrobotics.org/wiki/index.php?title=SD_Card_Image

--
Dave Hylands
Shuswap, BC, Canada
http://www.davehylands.com

[Wayne C. Gramlich]

Bob:

The HBRC wiki has some pages:

http://hbrobotics.org/wiki/index.php?title=Robot_Reference_Platform

On 06/15/2011 09:34 PM, Bob Smith wrote:
> I am trying to come up to speed on the club reference board
> and have some questions about it.....
>
> - Has anyone successfully built and installed a new kernel?
> If so, what web site did you follow?

I'm not sure if the scripts actually build a new kernel or not
not.

> - Has anyone been able to change the uInitrd initial RAM disk?
> If so, what tool did you use to edit or create it?

Since I am not really a kernel person, I do not understand this
question. Maybe somebody else can answer it.

> - Has anyone gotten the kernel to boot while showing the whole
> boot log on the serial port?
> If so, how did you do this?

http://hbrobotics.org/wiki/index.php?title=SD_Card_Image

When I was all done, the whole thing booted from a serial
port only.

-Wayne

[Bob Smith]

Dave Hylands wrote:
> What do you mean by a "new kernel"?

You know... something like 'make ARCH=arm menuconfig' followed
by a 'make ARCH=ARM CROSS_COMPILE=.....'

>> - Has anyone been able to change the uInitrd initial RAM disk?
>> If so, what tool did you use to edit or create it?

This may be an initramfs and not an initrd. The mkinitramfs
utility can make them but I'd like to examine what is in the one
we already have.

>> - Has anyone gotten the kernel to boot while showing the whole
>> boot log on the serial port?
>> If so, how did you do this?
>
> It just does that by default.

Hmmmm.... do you see a message "Freeing unused memory" just the
system starts running the userspace init scripts? I do not.

> Here's a link to the minimal FS
> http://omappedia.org/wiki/Minimal-FS

Yeah, omappedia has been the best reference so far and want a
minimal Debian system. Not Ubuntu and not Android.

> Here's a link to the validation stuff:
> http://pandaboard.org/node/13531/#debug

The board runs fine.

> And, I was also able to build and boot using the SD Card image built
> using this site:
> http://hbrobotics.org/wiki/index.php?title=SD_Card_Image

Yes, this works fine too.

thanks
Bob Smith

[Bob Smith]

Bob Smith wrote:
>>> - Has anyone been able to change the uInitrd initial RAM disk?
>>> If so, what tool did you use to edit or create it?
> This may be an initramfs and not an initrd. The mkinitramfs
> utility can make them but I'd like to examine what is in the one
> we already have.

A little more searching found an answer to this one.
http://omappedia.org/wiki/Development_With_Ubuntu

Bob

[David Murphy]

I seem to recall that the 'console' arg is not set by default in the
bootargs, and that the name is ttyO2, rather than the typical ttyS2.

Do you have the console arg set?

On Jun 15, 10:08 pm, Bob Smith <bsm...@linuxtoys.org> wrote:
> Dave Hylands wrote:
...

> >> - Has anyone gotten the kernel to boot while showing the whole
> >>  boot log on the serial port?
> >>   If so, how did you do this?
>
> > It just does that by default.
>
>    Hmmmm.... do you see a message "Freeing unused memory" just the
> system starts running the userspace init scripts?   I do not.
>

...
>
> thanks
> Bob Smith

[Dave Hylands]

Hi Bob,

On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 10:08 PM, Bob Smith <bsm...@linuxtoys.org> wrote:
...snip...

>>> - Has anyone gotten the kernel to boot while showing the whole
>>>  boot log on the serial port?
>>>  If so, how did you do this?
>>
>> It just does that by default.
>
>  Hmmmm.... do you see a message "Freeing unused memory" just the
> system starts running the userspace init scripts?   I do not.

I captured my boot log from booting from the minimal-FS:
http://www.davehylands.com/Misc/hb/boot-minimal.txt

and another when booting the SD-Card Image created from the HBRobotRef Wiki:
<http://www.davehylands.com/Misc/hb/boot-hb.txt>

I included a printenv of my u-boot environment as well (for each one -
since they're different).

[Ralph Gnauck]

Hi Bob,

 

If you use the image from the HBRC RRP SD_Image scripts, and follow it all the way to the end - running the two sets of scripts on the Panda after you boot, it should included the kernel sources that match the installed kernel.

 

You should also be able to use apt-get to pull in new pre -built images and source/header packages from the Ubuntu repositories.

 

Some special notes on Panda/Ubuntu/kernels:

 

If you stick with the normal Ubuntu way of doing things it should automatically keep the boot image and Intitrfs images updated when you install any new packages that need to update them.

 

It uses the /boot folder to keep the boot scripts, initramfs, uImage etc and will use flash-kernel tools to update the SD Card.

If you want to manually change the boot files etc, change the copies in this folder and run flash-kernel to replace the ones on the SD Card.

 

There should be a copy of the kernel config file in that directory also so you can rebuild the kernel using the same config as was used to create the one that is installed.

If you customize your kernel config to rebuild the kernel put a copy back in /boot for later reference.

 

Also: For the TI specific drivers etc, (WiFi, graphics accelerator, bluetooth ...) TI uses the Ubuntu DKMS system that will automatically rebuild the drivers and reinstall them if you update your kernel.

 

Not sure how this works if you build your own kernel, but I would hope that if you build it on the board and run 'make install' afterwords, it would take care of all of this for you also. WE NEED  TO TEST THIS!!!

 

If you cross compile a kernel I recommend making a package from it and installing it as a package, then all of this should take care of itself also.

 

Ralph.

ps: I will contact you off list with some BB4 driver questions - yes I am making good progress again!!!

 

---

From: Dave Hylands <dhyl...@gmail.com>
To: robotrefere...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Thu, June 16, 2011 12:34:34 AM
Subject: Re: [RobotRefPlatform] Pandaboard kernel questions .....

[Bob Smith]

Thanks all for your advice. This is all starting to make
sense. I'll try to get all this to work and report back
in a few days.

Bob

Wayne C. Gramlich wrote:
> The HBRC wiki has some pages:Dave Hylands wrote:

Dave Hylands wrote:
> I captured my boot log from booting from the minimal-FS:
> http://www.davehylands.com/Misc/hb/boot-minimal.txt