Saturday, October 16, 2010

meego kernel on pandaboard?

What exactly is a kernel? at the end of the day, just a collection of patches :).. So yeah, I have a "unique" collection of patches for PandaBoard that I requested MeeGo kernel maintainers to pick up yesterday. Now to wait and see if they actually get accepted. Next steps would be tough:

DSS - omapfb enablement
EHCI - keyboard and mouse

As usual, the patches to provide the basic functionality does'nt seem to have made it upstream yet.. I sometimes wonder - Is it really so hard to push patches upstream?? Then I realize, I push patches in my spare time :) Which basically means that I am not driven by the chruning winds of business forces within the work environment dictating when and what patches I should be posting upstream :). Glad I still retain that flexibility. and probably the reason I do move seemingly faster - I always have the luxury to maintain focus on upstreaming my patchset.. it is all that hard when one writes in BOLD on one's office white board:
DID YOU CHECK YOUR PATCH STATUS: xyz
When one does'nt have a manager to remind one to follow up on patches upstream, I guess it makes it self driven - the most effective way of upstreaming.. it is long, it is arduous, it is constantLink monitoring, it is techno-political + there is a bit of learning how to write English involved.. but mostly it is one's personal drive and attitude I guess.. we all like to talk in a common language -> it tends to the "bottom posting", git format patch format etc.. bit of net-etiquette involved.. yeah we'r all mostly C-speaking people and would rather see code-ware than slide-ware and more importantly it should *work* ;)..

Felipe B's post is an excellent real-world read on what it is all about. It is not really that difficult.. it just needs practise.. We all help share what we learn.. but *you* (dear reader) need to step up and post a patch first for us to help tell you how to post a patch ;)


Thursday, October 14, 2010

Tired of ttySx and ttyOx

Recently linux-omap integrated omap-serial patches. Now we dont use ttyS2 anymore but use ttyO2. tired of switching kernel versions and fixing my getty, wrote the following
In my busybox /etc/init.d/rcS file:

proc=`mount|grep "proc"`
if [ -z "proc" ]; then
mount -t procfs none /proc
fi
if [ -f /proc/cmdline ]; then
# grab console from cmdline and use it..
tty=`cat /proc/cmdline|sed -e "s/ /\n/g"|grep console|cut -d '=' -f2|cut -d ',' -f1`
if [ -z "tty" ]; then
echo `cat /proc/cmdline` "does'nt have console?"
else
# remove my previous one if it exists
rm -f /dev/tty-bd
ln -s /dev/$tty /dev/tty-bd
echo "/dev/$tty linked to /dev/tty-bd - using as console"
fi
else
echo "cmdline not found - no console?"
fi

In my inittab:

tty-bd::askfirst:-/bin/sh