I like this list more than blogs and I'm in one of those sharing kinda
moods.

So every single day is a new adventure in the embedded world. I learn a
bit more and I share a bit more every day (mostly via IRC vs this list).
It's a fun an exciting time to be apart of Gentoo.

Anyway I geared up for winter and got 4 new embedded boards based mostly
around the sc324XX series (aka OpenMoko CPU) and a stk500(AVR). So
hopefully our handbooks board files will fill up a bit more..

We have a new dev in training on the embedded side named Angelo Arrifano
aka miknix that originated with the linwizard project who will be
joining our team to help out with PDA/CellPhone/GPE/OpenMoko alike
things. He started out as what Gentoo calls an 'AT' for amd64. But it
turns out he was one of the masterminds behind the porting of the
HTC-wizard to linux. So he is much more useful over here. It was during
the porting of the wizard that I noticed his skills and attention to
detail. Often finding and coming up with better fixes than me. So I
quite look fwd to him joining our team soon.

Crossdev is known to have a few problems building recently. Bails out on
headers on pretty much every arch. There are two workarounds for this
that I know of at the moment. One is to hack the ebuild and add
--disable-headers and the other is to simply let crossdev fail. Then
emerge -1O cross-$CHOST/gcc && crossdev -t $CHOST while making sure
nsl/iconv/locales are disabled. I'm sure spanky will fix that soon if he
has not already.

If you still have difficulty. There is http://tinderbox.dev.gentoo.org/
which provides binary pkgs for a lot of chosts and cross toolchains.

Is gentoo-embedded satisfying your basic/common needs? What more
can/should we do as a multi arch distro?

Random Good links:

http://www.sparkfun.com
http://www.soekris.com
http://www.elinux.org
http://www.lynxmotion.com
http://www.jameco.com
http://www.maxim-ic.com
http://www.digikey.com
http://www.arduino.cc
http://www.nslu2-linux.org
http://wiki.openembedded.net
http://embedded.gentoo.org
https://everything.else...



--
Ned Ludd <solar/gentoo.org>

On Tue, 02 Sep 2008 21:57:37 -0700
Ned Ludd <solar@gentoo.org> wrote:

> We have a new dev in training on the embedded side named Angelo Arrifano
> aka miknix that originated with the linwizard project who will be
> joining our team to help out with PDA/CellPhone/GPE/OpenMoko alike
> things. He started out as what Gentoo calls an 'AT' for amd64. But it
> turns out he was one of the masterminds behind the porting of the
> HTC-wizard to linux. So he is much more useful over here. It was during
> the porting of the wizard that I noticed his skills and attention to
> detail. Often finding and coming up with better fixes than me. So I
> quite look fwd to him joining our team soon.
>

The porting of linux to the HTC-wizard involved a lot of people. I
first joined the project when they already have the most difficult part
done - the Linux booting. Then was time to give focus to each
particular driver and building the userspace image. With the help of
the Vapier emerge cross-compile guide (at the time it was the only
guide available), I managed to get my first x-compiled gentoo root which
I used to build the linwizard userspace image. With crossdev, portage,
a good environment and lots of patience, cross-compiling has proved to
be reliable.
Later, solar entered into scene. He managed to build some more root
images and offered us a chroot on miranda where we could cook linwizard.
Now, with his help, we have a awesome x-compile environment on miranda
that builds stuff with relative minimal effort.

Gentoo is certainly the way to go..

Thanks all, specially Ned.
--
Angelo Arrifano AKA MiKNiX
Computation and Intelligent Systems
MsC Student at UBI, Portugal
http://miknix.homelinux.com
PGP Pubkey 0x3D92BB0B

Ned Ludd wrote:
> Random Good links:
>
> http://www.soekris.com

http://pcengines.ch/alix.htm


//Peter

Peter Stuge wrote:
> http://pcengines.ch/alix.htm

Sorry, wanted to mention that they run very well with coreboot, an
open source replacement for the BIOS. You can do many really nice
things for embedded when you can control also the boot firmware.

(Power-to-app in milliseconds, for example.)


//Peter

Hi Peter,

> > http://pcengines.ch/alix.htm
>
> Sorry, wanted to mention that they run very well with coreboot, an
> open source replacement for the BIOS. You can do many really nice
> things for embedded when you can control also the boot firmware.
It seems that these boards are shipped with TinyBIOS, which is also release
under an open license. Is coreboot so much faster/more open/better?

Also, I don't see any removable flash chip on the boards. Does this mean that
if^H^Hwhen you brick the board, it's over, or is there some backdoor?

Gr.

Matthijs

Am Donnerstag 04 September 2008 17:39:57 schrieb Matthijs Kooijman:

I have one Alix as my firewall / router / server, works very well!

> It seems that these boards are shipped with TinyBIOS, which is also release
> under an open license. Is coreboot so much faster/more open/better?
>
> Also, I don't see any removable flash chip on the boards. Does this mean
> that if^H^Hwhen you brick the board, it's over, or is there some backdoor?
>
From the documentation:
'- Header for LPC bus (use for flash recovery or I/O expansion)'

Marius

Hi Matthijs,

Matthijs Kooijman wrote:
> > > http://pcengines.ch/alix.htm
> >
> > coreboot
>
> It seems that these boards are shipped with TinyBIOS, which is also
> release under an open license. Is coreboot so much faster/more
> open/better?

I certainly think so, but as a coreboot developer I will be biased.

TinyBIOS is a light and lean BIOS while coreboot has another focus.
coreboot doesn't want to be a BIOS, it only does very early hardware
initialization and then it hands over to another program (the payload
in coreboot terms) which can be a bootloader (FILO for kernels on
disk, EtherBoot/gPXE network etc) or a Linux kernel or even an
application using the C library libpayload. There is also an open
source BIOS payload called SeaBIOS. The payload goes with coreboot
into the flash chip.


> Also, I don't see any removable flash chip on the boards. Does this
> mean that if^H^Hwhen you brick the board, it's over, or is there
> some backdoor?

As was mentioned, the LPC bus is available on a pin header, and
PC Engines offer the LPC.1A product for those who want to experiment
with firmware: http://pcengines.ch/lpc1a.htm

It's not available in the order form, but just send them an email,
they are very friendly.

Of course you can also hook up a ROM emulator to the LPC bus. There
are a few different products available, more or less commercial. One
open source solution called the FLASH-PLAICE just uses the Xilinx
Spartan 3E FPGA eval board.

PC Engines also make pinouts and many schematics available online
which warms the hardware hacker hearts.


//Peter

Peter Stuge wrote:

Peter Stuge wrote:


http://pcengines.ch/alix.htm



Sorry, wanted to mention that they run very well with coreboot, an
open source replacement for the BIOS. You can do many really nice
things for embedded when you can control also the boot firmware.

(Power-to-app in milliseconds, for example.)





Can you please expand a little more on this with particular regard to
the Alix2?



TinyBios already boots to the linux kernel in a couple of seconds, but
I am personally having trouble getting the kernel to load in less than
about 10-12 seconds (using a lightly tweaked 2.6 kernel).* Shorter boot
times would be quite desirable for my design...



Also you have quite a lot of yellow in your support matrix.* Given I
need all the features of the board for my design (pretty much),
including the flashing lights and the optional buzzer, what problems am
I going to run into with stuff not working?* Am I likely to care that
ACPI is unsupported?



My design is basically a fancy router + mail server + couple of other
embedded apps.* It's commercial so it would be useful to understand how
to comply with the (GPL) licensing terms?



Ed W

On Wednesday 03 September 2008, Ned Ludd wrote:
> Crossdev is known to have a few problems building recently. Bails out on
> headers on pretty much every arch. There are two workarounds for this
> that I know of at the moment. One is to hack the ebuild and add
> --disable-headers and the other is to simply let crossdev fail. Then
> emerge -1O cross-$CHOST/gcc && crossdev -t $CHOST while making sure
> nsl/iconv/locales are disabled.

not sure why people think they need to hack things. the crossdev
flag --without-headers works exactly the same.

i seem to have some free time atm to catch up on some things ...
-mike

On Sunday 26 October 2008, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> On Wednesday 03 September 2008, Ned Ludd wrote:
> > Crossdev is known to have a few problems building recently. Bails out on
> > headers on pretty much every arch. There are two workarounds for this
> > that I know of at the moment. One is to hack the ebuild and add
> > --disable-headers and the other is to simply let crossdev fail. Then
> > emerge -1O cross-$CHOST/gcc && crossdev -t $CHOST while making sure
> > nsl/iconv/locales are disabled.
>
> not sure why people think they need to hack things. the crossdev
> flag --without-headers works exactly the same.
>
> i seem to have some free time atm to catch up on some things ...

all the low hanging fruit should be squashed now. at least on my G5, i was
able to install these targets with crossdev:
arm: glibc-2.8 / gcc-4.3.2
sh4: glibc-2.8 / gcc-4.3.2
i686: glibc-2.8 / gcc-4.3.2
powerpc64: glibc-2.8 / gcc-4.3.2
i686: uclibc-0.9.30 / gcc-4.3.2

peace out
-mike