From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "Ron Bianco" To: Subject: RE: A stable linux 2.2.xx for sandpoint-8240 anywhere? Date: Fri, 29 Dec 2000 15:31:52 -0800 Message-ID: <000901c071ef$85b814d0$4d012ac7@warp-speed> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" In-Reply-To: <3A4D079E.1778BCEC@mvista.com> Sender: owner-linuxppc-embedded@lists.linuxppc.org List-Id: Thanks Dan & Tom, > > There are problems as this port was based on an experimental > and unstable > > kernel. > > There are patches (tons) that fix some of the problems we've > been seeing, > > Really? Although not suitable for a product, there shouldn't be "tons" > of patches required to make it useful in a development environment. > There may be patches required to work around the different revisions > of the Sandpoint hardware. We do now need something suitable for a product. And to use initrd as root. I was attempting to summarize the following conclusions of a co-worker: "By the way, last night I found info on the one problem we were having with the linux kernel booting. The people at Montavista originally ported linux 2.3.16 to the PPC 8240 chip. all linux 2.3.* versions are designated as experimental and unstable. Since then (feb 2000) there have been over 100 sets of patches to the linux kernel. I'll take a look to see what is best to do: apply the changes to the stable 2.2.18 kernel, or apply the changes to the almost stable 2.4.0-test12, the totally latest kernel version as of last week. The changes themselves have to change depending on what is chosen. The problem with the initial ram disk is not a ram disk specific bug, the bug is in the MMU paging/caching system and I don't think it was fixed until 2.3.47 or so. It can cause other subtle problems, such as crashing during ftp of large files." > That is where all of the resources seem to be going right now, to > custom hardware. The 8240 is just a 603 with 106/107 OpenPIC PCI > bridge. The Sandpoint is what required all of the code changes. If > your hardware is like a Sandpoint, then there are still changes > required to suit your needs. Most people aren't building Sandpoint-like > hardware that I know about. > > > Eventually we'll make our patches for 8240 available. > > Do it quickly, as there will soon be 824x updates in the 2.4 kernel. We'll probably wait to see what those are, so as to avoid duplication. Yeah, our board is not very sandpoint-like either. But changing sandpoint_setup.c (and sandpoint_pci.c) to suit our board seemed the easiest. Now that I'm finished debugging the hardware, the final kernel changes we needed were minor. Ron ** Sent via the linuxppc-embedded mail list. See http://lists.linuxppc.org/