[okl4-developer] Booting OKL4 on the neo1973 (emulator)

[Geoffrey Lee]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2007 at 11:08:49PM +1100, Jamie Wilkinson wrote:


> >
> >Have a look at this page on some instructions on how to boot the
> >OpenMoko hardware[1].  Everything else still applies, except
> >in this case you load the OKL4 boot image (image.boot) rather than
> >the Linux boot image.
> 
> Sorry, I wasn't clear enough.  I think I have image.boot running in the
> emulator, what I wanted to know was how would I go about running the
> OpenMoko platform under OKL4, or any sort of interaction with the OKL4
> kernel once it's running.
> 

The current downloadable version of OKL4 lacks some features which 
make it not possible to run the OpenMoko stack at this point.
Off the top of my head it lacks NPTL.  As well, one would probably have to 
store the filesystem image somewhere on flash.  There currently isn't 
Iguana-based flash driver in the downloadable version.


> I'm not a kernel hacker, just a sysadmin, so please excuse my noobness :)
> 
> I.e. I think it will be possible to run OpenMoko and other embedded
> operating system stacks on the Neo, using OKL4 as a base platform to run
> those other stacks on top of.  So I'm curious how to work with OKL4 to get
> those client OSes running.

Running a software stack on top of OKL4 should be quite
straightforward.

The easiest is to simply copy the files over to the root disk package,
which, during part of the build process is used to create an
in-memory root disk image.

If you have a larger stack, you would probably store the filesystem
image in the flash, and either load that as the root filesystem,
or re-pivot the root filesystem from the OK Linux RAMdisk.

Finally if the software stack depends on kernel support for some
things they will have to be supported (e.g. NPTL).  OK Linux
is based off a vanilla Linux, so if the stack relies on additional patches 
that are not in vanilla then they will have to be patched into
OK Linux.  you will also probably need appropriate drivers, for
the OpenMoko there are already a number of them in the 1.5.2 release.

	-gl
> 
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