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Monday, 27 September 2010
Armel buildds and porter box hosted at ARM
One of the nice things that I've been involved with since starting to work at ARM in Cambridge is setting up newer, faster machines to help with the armel port. We have six machines hosted in the machine room here now:
All of these machines are Marvell DB-78x00-BP development boards, each configured with a 1GHz Feroceon processor (ARM v5t), 1.5GB of RAM and a 250GB drive attached via SATA. They're nice machines, reasonably powerful yet (as with many ARM-based machines) they draw very very little electrical power even when working hard. These very boards were used for a while by the folks at Canonical to help build the Ubuntu armel port, but now we've got them. In terms of configuration, these machines are not quite fully supported in Debian yet, though. The kernels we're using are locally-built, based on the Debian linux-source-2.6.32 package but with a .config (marvell.config) that's tweaked slightly to add the support for these boards. There aren't any source changes needed, so I'm hoping to get support added directly in Debian, either as a new kernel flavour or (preferred) as a patch to an existing flavour. I've had conflicting advice about whether the latter is possible, so I'm going to have to experiment and find out for myself. UPDATE 2010-09-28: I've tested, and it seems that the boards will need a new flavour after all, as the config is incompatible with the closest other config (kirkwood). Ah well... I had no end of trouble trying to get make-kpkg do the right thing, so on advice from Ben I built the kernel using "make deb-pkg", a standard target in the Linux kernel's build system:
Annoyingly, that wouldn't work when cross-compiling either so I had to build the kernel natively. To make the resulting kernel image package install properly (and, just as importantly, allow for future easy upgrades for the DSA folks), I also needed the following tweaks to the Debian system:
Finally, I've tweaked the uboot config on the machines to use the uImage and uInitrd files that are generated:
And that's it, as far as I can see. I'll now wait for people to tell me what I've got wrong above... :-) 13:59 :: # :: /debian/arm :: 0 comments |
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