On 11/15/2012 09:49 AM, Peter Robinson wrote:
On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 2:38 PM, Paul Whalen
<pwhalen(a)redhat.com> wrote:
> Good day all,
>
> Many lucky Fedora users have already received their shiny new Chromebooks and have
begun
> tinkering, with some reports of Fedora 18 up and running.
Around Christmas I also got a Samsung arm-based Chromebook. I managed to get a F18 test
images for the panda board running using the existing kernel from chromeos.
>
> We'd like to discuss supporting this exciting device and adding another kernel
variant for
> the Exynos 5 SoC. Has anyone looked into upstream support and its status? Is anyone
> attempting to build their own kernel?
I've begun working on it. There's not upstream support for it yet, not
even in 3.7 so in the short term it would be a Remix kernel. I'm
hoping to get an initial remix kernel built by next week some time but
others are going to need to test as I don't have the relevant HW to do
so myself. The patch set to support it is quite large so I'm not even
going to consider adding patches to 3.6 or even 3.7. Maybe for 3.8.
On top of the kernel we need to look at the 2D X driver. There's a
upstream omap style driver in process but as it's a pure copy from
omap is also currently conflicts with the omap driver.
SystemTap really needs to have kernels with debuginfo and devel files around so it can
build instrumentation modules. The kernel borrowed from chrome os doesn't provide
those, so systemtap isn't too useful at the moment. I was looking around and came
across the following URL talking about locally building kernel for chromeos that might be
useful for the Fedora work:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/109993695638569781190/posts/34PYU79eUqP
It should provide some details on what exactly in in the kernel being used on the samsung
chrome book and the options being used to build a working kernel.
I am willing to be a test subject if you have a kernel you want to try out.
Other things we'll need to look at are:
- uboot - I think like trimslice this is in a SPI flash so we can
likely just work out what version/features/fork that it has so we work
out whether it uses boot.scr or uEnv.txt or what recipe is needed to
make it boot the kernel
- if we need various Firmware for any of the HW, whether it's upstream
in the linux-firmware package and if it's not whether we can get it
added there or need to deal with packaging it separately. The former
would be by far the easiest :-)
The above should get us basic Panda style usable support and from
there we need to look at various other HW support (sound etc) and
optimising the platform (both performance and power)
Peter
-Will