Fedora ARM 12 on IGEPv2 (Beagle Board clone)
by Matthew Wilson
Hi all,
I would like to introduce myself to the group. I have recently
received an IGEPv2 board [1], which is based on the Beagle Board, but
with wifi, bluetooth, ethernet, and more RAM. I'm still at the "wow,
it's tiny and it runs Linux" stage. I should get a bit more time over
the next month and Christmas to play around properly with it.
I'm new to embedded development, but neither new to Linux nor ARM
(writing my first ARM assembly some 15 years ago). However, for the
past 6 years I've not even built a Linux kernel, preferring to use the
default kernel in Fedora for simplicity :)
Firstly, a thank you to those involved in Fedora ARM for getting it to
this stage. If I get the time, I'd really like to contribute some
(probably small) effort to help get Fedora ARM working well on the
IGEPv2 and Beagle Board. As I progress, I'd like to know what I can
do to help.
In the meantime, I have some questions. Apologies in advance if these
seem simple.
1) There are various different kernels from different sources. I'm
used to there being a small set of "right" kernels (that is, Fedora's
idea of "right") for x86. I fully appreciate that different ARM-based
boards are quite different in capabilities (like different instruction
set variants).
a) Is there likely to be some standardised vanilla Fedora ARM kernel
source? (Or is that simply the source RPM available for Fedora?)
Then patches /could/ be offered for the more common systems (e.g.
Beagle Board & clones, SheevaPlug).
b) Would it then make sense to offer these as pre-built RPMs for common systems?
c) Is there any guidance on which version is good to use as a base?
I've seen quite different kernel versions being used (from 2.6.27 to
2.6.31).
2) I understand a little bit about the different calling conventions,
FP differences (e.g. soft FPU versus VFP), and instruction set
differences (v5 versus v7).
a) Can the kernel can be safely built with a different instruction set
targeted? (I know there are different optimisation options passed to
GCC. Apologies if this seems a bit newbie-ish.)
b) For FP-heavy programs (e.g. ogg encoding), is it possible to build
the packages with VFP/NEON but still get them to work in a soft FPU
system? I'd imagine any call to an external library would have to
somehow be defined to use a different calling standard.
3) There seem to be some missing dependencies in the packages in the
current Fedora ARM repository. For example, emacs is requiring
libotf, which doesn't seem to be there in the repository. And
likewise with the xorg-x11-font* packages needing ttmkdir. I'm
confused as to how the RPM could have been successfully built without
it. What am I missing?
4) I see there has been some discussion over unaligned data access.
(Oh, I remember that from the ARM2 days.) It seems as if the
Cortex-A8 cores allow unaligned data access when set up to do so [2].
Does this, in any way, help with the compatibility of packages
targetting Cortex-A8?
5) I've managed to get various source packages missing from the Fedora
ARM repositories to compile successfully (natively). I guess there is
a reason why there are not in the repos right now -- is that reason
down to time and priorities, or is there some blocking bugs with many
of these packages?
I look forward to being able to contribute something back into Fedora!
Kind regards,
Matthew
[1] http://www.igep-platform.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id...
[2] http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.arm.doc.ddi0344j/Beih...
7 years, 11 months
F14 qemu arm default board
by omalleys＠msu.edu
In F14 x86, we finally have the ability to add an ARM based VM via the
libvirt management tool!! IE you can go through the GUI and set up an
qemu based arm VM*.
It defaults to the integratorcp board. But our image/kernel for F12 is
for the versatile board.)
The physical specs for the integrator board support a max of 256 megs
of ram and only support the arm9 processors. I assume qemu only
supports this, or at least I ran into issues when i tried to bump up
the ram for the versatile boards.
I am -assuming- this isn't the fastest board/processor combo... Does
anyone have a clue what is? Then we can change it upstream and make a
f13-alpha image for it.
*since we don't seem to support kickstart, and we don't have an
installer, you can really only import in an existing image. But hey it
is better then what we had!
Sean
12 years, 11 months
F13-alpha rootfs repo issues
by omalleys＠msu.edu
I just made a repo from scratch with the mkrootfs-13 script.
If I poke through the repolists in yum.repos.d The only one enabled is
for rawhide, and if I substitute armv5tel or arm for the arch, i get
an invalid arch. (it works for say x86_64)
The mirror for the F12 image points to wantstofly.org
12 years, 11 months
OpenOffice RPMs
by Gordan Bobic
Are there OpenOffice RPMs available for Fedora 12? I'm trying to build
the src.rpm from RHEL6b2 on F12 ARM, but the machine has only 450MB of
RAM, so it OOMs during the build. Are there any pre-built binary RPMs
available?
Gordan
12 years, 11 months
arm turnoff gpio's power
by 钟威
Hi guys, I want to turnoff some gpio's power on my board when it entered suspend and when it resumed turnon the gpio.My codes is:"gpio_set_value(BABBAGE_POWER_ON, 0);""gpio_set_value(BABBAGE_POWER_ON, 1);" I want to know where can I put my codes in?I have tried to put it in the two functions "suspend_devices_and_enter()","suspend_enter()" which are in kerne/power/suspend.c,but it didn't work which can't resume. Anyone can give me some tips,I really don't konw what can I do.Thanks all!
Best Regards,William
12 years, 11 months
Xorg Keyboard Problem on Toshiba AC100
by Gordan Bobic
Hi,
I'm having severe keyboard issues on the Toshiba AC100 under Xorg.
Keyboard doesn't work _at all_. In xorg.conf, everything seems to be OK,
it finds the keyboard and the mouse.
The only odd thing is that it also detects the webcam and says it thinks
it is a keyboard. I have removed the /dev/input/event3 node that the
webcam uses and added a fdi policy file to ensure that HAL ignores it
(and verified that it is in fact ignoring it). So I am reasonably
confident that this isn't the core of the problem.
Unfortunately, since there are no obvious errors in the Xorg log, I'm
not sure where to look for the problem next. The text mode console works
fine, but Xorg seems to ignore the keyboard inputs. I have looked at the
wiki page here on the subject
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/EvdevInputDriver
and that says that situations like this should be deemed critical bugs.
How can I get to the bottom of what is actually causing the problem?
Gordan
12 years, 11 months
Updated cross binutils and gcc patches against rawhide
by Andy Green
Hi -
Here are updates I just got working of Lennert and David's patches
against current rawhide gcc and binutils:
binutils-2.20.51.0.12-2.fc15.src.rpm
gcc-4.5.1-5.fc15.src.rpm
which generate updated binutils and gcc cross packages. The old ones
are fine except that they're no longer able to build current kernels
without errors.
They're tested to generate working cross compiler packages on x86_64
host; the compilers generate a working kernel.org kernel on iMX31 and
can link a test app with printf() OK, since I just need them for kernel
compile duties I didn't go any further with cross userspace.
You can use the patches like this:
1) Grab the source RPMs you want to build against
2) cd into your rpmbuild/SOURCES dir and use
rpm2cpio <source rpm> | cpio -id
to unpack, then mv *.spec ../SPECS
3) patch the binuntils.spec and gcc.spec files with the diffs; they
should apply cleanly at least with exactly the rawhide sources above
4) rpmbuild -ba --define "binutils_target armv5tel-redhat-linux-gnueabi"
rpmbuild/SPECS/gcc.spec
5) rpm -i
rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/armv5tel-redhat-linux-gnueabi-binutils-2.20.51.0.12-2.fc15.x86_64.rpm
6) rpmbuild -ba --define="cross_target armv5tel-redhat-linux-gnueabi"
rpmbuild/SPECS/gcc.spec
7) as root: cd rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64 ; rpm -Uvf
armv5tel-redhat-linux-gnueabi-gcc-4.5.1-5.cross12.x86_64.rpm
armv5tel-redhat-linux-gnueabi-libgcc-4.5.1-5.cross12.x86_64.rpm
armv5tel-redhat-linux-gnueabi-libgomp-4.5.1-5.cross12.x86_64.rpm
armv5tel-redhat-linux-gnueabi-cpp-4.5.1-5.cross12.x86_64.rpm
armv5tel-redhat-linux-gnueabi-libstdc++-4.5.1-5.cross12.x86_64.rpm
8) That's it!
-Andy
12 years, 11 months
ARMv7 rootfs/repository?
by Gordan Bobic
Is there such a thing available? So far I have been working with a
Sheeva Plug which is ARMv5 (Marvell Kirkwood) based, so the armv5tel was
a good match.
But this morning, my Genesi Efika Smartbook arrived in the post, which
is ARMv7 (Freescale i.MX515 Cortex-A8), and I think there might be
considerably more performance to be extracted from it if an ARMv7
compiled distro is used. I have found mentions of a F10 armv7l build for
a Beagle Board, but I was hoping for a more recent distro. Is there such
a thing available with a recent version of Fedora (ideally F12)? Or am I
going to have to build one myself?
Thanks.
Gordan
12 years, 11 months
Re: [fedora-arm] ARMv7 rootfs/repository?
by Peter Robinson
On Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 2:26 PM, Andrew Burgess <aab(a)cichlid.com> wrote:
> On 12/23/2010 01:11:18 AM, Peter Robinson wrote:
>
>> > are you sure the fp arg style is a kernel issue?
>> > are there system calls that take floats (not in structs or arrays
>> > but as a single argument)?
>>
>> From all the documentation about it seems so. You need to remember
>> there's a lot of mainline distros (and I'm not talking about small
>> embedded ones) looking to move to arm7 + hardfp but none that have yet
>> done so. There's lots of notes and people that have done customer
>> recompiles etc for testing and eval purposes but none that have
>> actually done it yet across the entire mainline distro to run
>> everything from apache to gnome.
>
> I guess I'm determined to learn all the dirty details here :-)
> Do you know of better places to research this than the fedora-arm
> list archives?
Google? :-P
But from some of the links that I've found or people have pointed out
on #fedora-arm
http://wiki.debian.org/ArmHardFloatTodo
http://cygwin.com/ml/libc-ports/2009-04/msg00020.html
http://www.linux-archive.org/debian-dpkg/395698-armelfp-new-architecture-...
There's also some details on both the MeeGo and Linaro wiki's that
cover the direction that Ubuntu and MeeGo are taking.
Peter
12 years, 11 months
where to look for fedora cross toolchain SRPMS
by Saleem Ansari
I wanted to see how the corss toolchain for fedora was built so I
tried to fetch is source RPMs.
All I got is "No source RPM found" as below:
$ yumdownloader --source armv5tel-redhat-linux-gnueabi-gcc
Loaded plugins: presto, refresh-packagekit
Enabling updates-source repository
Enabling rpmfusion-nonfree-updates-source repository
Enabling rpmfusion-nonfree-source repository
Enabling rpmfusion-free-updates-source repository
Enabling livna-source repository
Enabling fedora-source repository
Enabling rpmfusion-free-source repository
No source RPM found for
armv5tel-redhat-linux-gnueabi-gcc-4.1.2-33.fa1.cross5.x86_64
Nothing to download
Now I have two questions:
1 - Where do I locate the toolchain SRPMS?
2 - Which of the toolchains - GNUARM or CodeSourcery - is packaged for Fedora?
/tuxdna
12 years, 11 months
