[jornada] Jornada 820

Dear Jornadans,

I'm still not working that much on the 820 front,
and when do, I find I'm pitifully slow at getting anything to work.

Still, there is some progress: blob now works on the Jornada 820.
You can now piggy-back a kernel on blob, boot into blob from hpcboot,
interact with blob at the serial console if you dare
(while colored lines drawn on the fb replace blob's usual LED indicator),
and finally run enough of the linux kernel so as to watch it crash.

Issues of Linux previously being loaded over the place
where the framebuffer was mapped are resolved.

Brief HOWTO:
1) backup your WinCE data -- you'll need to restore it, soon!
2) install hpcboot
3) get a linux kernel from arm.linux.org.uk
4) apply my patch (ouch, the one on my site is out of date - contact me)
5) compile linux
6) get blob from sourceforge.net
7) apply my patch from
8) compile (cd src/blob ; make blob-rest-elf32)
9) transfer blob to the jornada
10) boot into it from hpcboot
11) (optional) mess at blob's serial console - oh the joy
12) watch linux say "Uncompressing Linux................................................ done, booting the kernel." before it crashes. Yay!

As usual, my files are on
        Samaris.tunes.org:/pub/jornada820/linux

Now, it's time for some semi-serious kernel hacking.

Ok, it's not much of any "progress", but at least
* I learnt ARM assembly, out of experience, including my lot of mistakes.
* I am now confident that the job can be done, thanks to the wealth
 of supporting code and documentation. Maybe I'll later stumble
 on an undocumented feature (regarding the keyboard?),
 but there's a lot of room before I do.
* I now have a reassuring serial console to interact with in supervisor mode.
 At worst, I could port a FORTH system to help debugging.

I'll keep you tuned on any significant progress (or stumbling) I make.
If you're interested in actual kernel hacking for the 820, contact me.

Thanks to the NetBSD/hpcarm team for hpcboot.
Thanks to the blob team for blob.

Yours freely,

[ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
[ TUNES project for a Free Reflective Computing System | http://tunes.org ]
Due to circumstances beyond your control, you are master of your fate
and captain of your soul.
Received on Sun Jun 16 11:58:34 2002