Nishanth' tech rambles

This year seems to be the year of the hacker community :) TI opened PandaBoard for early adopters today :).. Good details on PandaBoard here . The usual goodies schematics and userguide etc are already up as well.. Some of the stuff that impressed me: HDMI AND DVI options HSUSB hub and Ethernet yaay.. Serial port is a decent serial port and no weird wiring needed ;) Connectors pin compatible to beagle and xm.. :) Did I forget to say you have 1271 onboard wlan?? And lots more.. Just love this Baby.. I run ubuntu at home on my panda (yep, am already part of the PEAP - PandaBoard Early Adopter Program) and working on getting MeeGo up and running as well. Supported in mainline kernel and mainline u-boot as well.. :) fun time ahead with multi core processing ;)

I am subscribed to TI's e2e portal and this post peeked my interest. Since sometime in mainline kernel we've had issues with kernel not booting up due to some weird bugs. As a kernel developer, I have screwed up multiple times preventing kernel boot from happening. Typical build results in: ## Booting kernel from Legacy Image at c0700000 ... Image Name: Linux-2.6.32-rc6 Image Type: ARM Linux Kernel Image (uncompressed) Data Size: 1939152 Bytes = 1.8 MB Load Address: c0008000 Entry Point: c0008000 Verifying Checksum ... OK Loading Kernel Image ... OK OK Starting kernel ... And that's it - no useful messages for the kernel geeks to figure out where the boot sequence crashed, no real debug information at all! So the first question: why the kernel silence? The boot messages can only be printed once you have the serial port enabled. Now, serial port enablement itself could be pretty much later in the kernel boot sequence, if the system crashes(oops/data abort e...

Thanks to rkw, heard of this: http://linux-c6x.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page it is based on 2.6.34 - pretty much closer to .36-rc5 ;) and needs some more work I guess.. mostly, it would be a great thing to get this running on beagleboard ! I cant think why not.. ;)

My Odyssey into MeeGo packaging continues today with U-boot packaging. Decision on the source First of all for U-boot package I needed to decide which source to use. Since I am no big fan of private repositories (even the ones hosted publicly!), the mainline u-boot was an obvious choice. Thankfully sakoman and rest of the u-boot community have done a great job in making omap3 and omap4 support available in Mainline u-boot . And yep, it does have PandaBoard and obviously beagleboard support as well. RPM saga Since the rule of a lazy programmer is not to invent something someone already has done, spend some time with google searching for readily available RPM packages for u-boot. One of the first things I hit was that our friends at Freescale had done a nify spec packaging for imx processors for packaging u-boot . But, looking closely I was not too impressed, searching a bit more, hit on the openmamba project and the excellent packaging that Silvan Calarco has done for u-boot. Though ...

Got myself a build.meego.com account and am attempting to start a new package around meego for pandaboard - an OMAP4 based platform. This series of blog posts will hopefully contain my day to day notes for a better lack of word all under the label of MeeGo ;).. Note: the good folks at DeviceVM had already done a MeeGo port to OMAP4 Blaze platform sometime back, my approach is a bit different in getting MeeGo port available in main MeeGo repository itself. Different challenge - mostly of the packaging kind as I am starting to realize ;) I've started my first experience with packaging for MeeGo with trying to put together a package for U-Boot. my lack of previous experience with rpm packaging has me stumped so far :(. On the base level, MeeGo uses rpm packaging - essentially what folks call a spec file . MeeGo folks have added one layering on top with yaml file which is translated by a set of tools called spectacle to translate the yaml to rpm spec file. Spectacle Since I like to...

Cortex-A15 MPCore - Welcome to the next generation!! update: 20100910: more of the TI story slashgeared !