[fedora-arm] Fedora 21 on BeagleBoard-xM Rev C

[Sergio Durigan Junior]

Hi there,

In the past couple of days, I have been trying to make Fedora 21 boot in
a BeagleBoard-xM Rev C.  Unfortunately, this doesn't work out of the box
as I expected, and I had to do many tweaks to the documented procedure:

  <https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/F21/Installation>

FWIW, I am using the Minimal Fedora image for this.

Well, the first thing I tried was following the exact instructions for a
BeagleBone:

  <https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/F21/Installation#For_the_BeagleBone_.28_Black_.26_White_.29>

But, as I said, this did not work.  I found that BeagleBoard-xM expects
the first partition to be a FAT one, and the image provided by Fedora
has an ext* partition.  OK, so I manually created an SDCard with a FAT
partition as the first one (where the u-boot files + the Linux kernel
stay), and then the rest of the partitions are the ones that you find in
the original image.  It worked, in the sense that I could turn on the
board and see something in the serial.  However, more problems ahead...

The second problem was about "catX" not being defined.  It is actually
defined in boot.cmd, but due to some bugs in the u-boot version that is
being used, it is not recongnized.  I found this message about the
subject:

  <https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2014-10/msg03127.html>

[It feels strange that nobody noticed/experienced this problem before; I
hope I'm not doing anything wrong...]

Anyway, after struggling a lot with this, I decided to give up the
original boot.cmd and write very simple boot.cmd + uEnv.txt files, just
for the board that I have.  The contents are:

boot.cmd: <http://paste.fedoraproject.org/191836/16762614/>

uEnv.txt: <http://paste.fedoraproject.org/191837/14251676/>

Those were obviously made using the definitions found in the original
boot.cmd file.  With them, the board can finally (and apparently) load
the Linux kernel + the initrd + the dtb files from the SDCard, but I
still can't make it to boot; it freezes after the "Starting kernel ..."
message, all the lights turn on, and nothing else happens..  Here is
what I see now:

  <http://fpaste.org/191831/25164279/>

It seems to me that I have made some mistake somewhere (offsets?  files
to load?  u-boot commands?), but I can't find it.  I was at least
expecting to see the "decompressing kernel" message, but nothing...  And
adding earlyprintk in the bootargs doesn't tell anything either.

So, I'm kind of running out of ideas on how to solve this, and I want to
get everything working until Monday.  Does anyone know what can be
wrong, or point me to some documentation that I can use to boot Fedora
21 on this BeagleBoard-xM?

Thanks a lot,

-- 
Sergio
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Please send encrypted e-mail if possible
http://sergiodj.net/