[okl4-developer] OKLinux on x86

[Geoffrey Lee]

On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 11:40:08AM +0100, Henning Schild wrote:
> On Wed, 12 Nov 2008 21:11:44 +1100
> Geoffrey Lee <glee at ok-labs.com> wrote:
> 
> >On the 2.1 release, the hardware serial device is shared between the
> >kernel debugger and a userlevel driver used by OK Linux.  This may be
> >causing some issues.  Can you try building a production build by 
> >appending enable_debug=False to the build command line, and see if you
> >get any output?  The initial dmesg output and the OKL4 banner will
> >go missing because the kernel serial driver will be compiled out.
> >
> >Otherwise, some trace output context might be quite useful in resolving
> >this issue.
> 
> I used the kernel debugger and its tracing feature to compare Qemu to
> the real machine. I did not find significant differences.
> However i tried starting linux processes on Qemu to get a better
> understanding what the spaces and clist views show.
> 
> After stacking a couple of shells on Qemu i tried the same thing on the
> real machine and it actually worked as expected. So the input channel
> for serial seems to work and OKLinux itself also seems to work. I
> started "sleep 5" on OKLinux and watched it from within kdb. There
> where 3 linux processes for 5 seconds. L_1 (init), L_6xx (sh) and
> L_6yy (sleep)
> 
> So the output of the serial console seems to broken. Is there a way to
> use VGA or framebuffer instead?

Yes, build for either the ia32_pc99_vga or ia32_pc99_fb target.

For the fb target you may need to enable the appropriate drivers
in the kernel, this is probably more work than just the vga
target.

Note: in the supplied ramdisk it encodes /dev/console as 4,64, which
equates to ttyS0.  You'd probably want to change that 5,1.  You can
do so by editing linux/rootfs-2.6.23-v2/dev.txt.


> I'd also be fine with using a ramdisk or booting a Linux from harddisk
> in order to access the box using ssh or something like. Would not be
> nice to boot blind but as long as i can use OKLinux at some point i
> dont care that much. Can i expect devices like harddisks or nics to work
> with OKLinux?

Some NICs and some hard disk controllers will work.  I used to enable
the Intel ICH driver (via libata) and a USB-based NIC on my development
box so they were tested quite regularly.

> 
> Henning

	-gl

> 
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