[fedora-arm] Pandaboard ES and Fedora

[Peter TB Brett]

On Fri, 20 Dec 2013 11:45:54 -0600, Jon <jdisnard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 20, 2013 at 8:38 AM, Peter TB Brett <peter at peter-b.co.uk>
> wrote:
>> On Fri, 20 Dec 2013 12:52:30 +0000, Peter Robinson
<pbrobinson at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> You and me too!
>>>
>>>> Have you by any chance collated any information on what exactly "not
>>>> working" entails during your experiments?  I'd really like to avoid
>>>> duplicating any work that other people have already done.  At the
>>>> moment
>>>> I'd be happy just to get the kernel to boot to a shell on a serial
>>>> console...!
>>>
>>> Well the current status for 3.11+ is that there's no output on the
>>> serial console, it doesn't boot, or at least appear to boot with
>>> anything on any console.
>>
>> Good news -- it looks like someone has got 3.12 booting on a Pandaboard
>> ES...
>>
>> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ports.arm.kernel/273868
>> http://pastebin.com/qQCmA2ng
>>
>> I'll try and get in touch with him directly to find out a bit more about
>> his setup and which ES variant he's using.
>>
> 
> Howdy folks,
> 
> I know the u-boot code was updated to support the right voltages and
> timings for the v3 Panda.
> I believe we got all the right bits in u-boot version 2013.10 that we
> ship, but there is always 2014.1 right around the corner.
> I've also heard rumors of what will become kernel 3.13 working, but
> that is always omap2+ def configs, probably not the multi-platform.
> In Fedora we need MP kernel or nothing, but perhaps a remix could be
> generated and omap2defconfig kernel kept off in a side repo?
> Some really big question marks here.
> 
> [cc'ing Nishanth]
> 
> Nishanth, care to confirm or deny the rumors?

Okay, I sent Nishanth an e-mail off-list and got a reply.  It's not good
news for B3, but it might be some help for earlier Pandaboard ES revisions:

On Fri, 20 Dec 2013 17:33:09 +0000, "Menon, Nishanth" <nm at ti.com> wrote:

> I have one of those pre b3 pandas with me. The b3 pandas switched DDR as
> you are probably aware from pandaboard mailing list and upstream won't
> work on them. I had asked svtronics sw guys to send upstream the
> required patches with 0 results so far :(

I'd potentially be interested in trying something like the following plan:

1) Find out enough info from Nishanth to make a F20 respin for my
Pandaboard.

2) Hack uboot around enough to get it running on my Pandaboard ES B3
(although Linux won't boot at that stage).

3) See if something resembling this patch [1] can be hacked into the kernel
to get the B3 kernel running.

Does that sound like it would have a reasonable chance of success, given
the current state of the uboot code?

I think the main issue I have with this plan is that I really don't
understand how to set up a toolchain etc. for creating a respin (I'd
probably want to do it either by cross-compiling or compiling in an
emulator).  Could someone please point me in the direction of the correct
documentation or some sort of howto?  For extra fun, I also haven't done
any non-trivial kernel hacking before...

Regards,

Peter


[1]
https://github.com/svtronics/kernel-pandaboard-ES-RevB3/commit/73364ecd773366cfc65c2efa32573901b24a0f5a



-- 
Dr Peter Brett
http://peter-b.co.uk/