andy-tracking kernel?

Fox Mulder Quakeman1 at gmx.net
Wed Dec 3 18:47:47 CET 2008


Andy Green wrote:
> Somebody in the thread at some point said:
> 
> | I've seen a lot of references to the "andy-tracking" kernel.  A search
> | of archives yields some info about this with regard to a shift to the
> | 2.6.27 kernel.  However, I've not been able to really understand what's
> | in it, or what the current state of the kernel is.
> |
> | Would someone mind elaborating a little on a few points:
> |
> | 1.  Is this generally available?  If so, where?
> 
> http://people.openmoko.org/andy has new binary versions every day or two
> at the moment.  These are "moredriver" kernels that have everything
> critical built in the kernel, but there's also a matching module tarball.
> 
> If you're using U-Boot to boot it, U-Boot has a 2MByte kernel limit by
> default and you need to meddle it:
> 
> setenv bootcmd setenv bootargs \${bootargs_base} \${mtdparts}\; nand
> read.e 0x32000000 kernel 0x300000\; bootm 0x32000000
> saveenv
> 
> Qi (the new bootloader replacing U-Boot) doesn't have these problems.
> 
> | 2.  I'm currently running Debian with the stock kernel that gets put in
> | place by the install.sh script.  Can I use this kernel with Debian?
> | There are caveats on the Debian pages about using other kernel, so has
> | anyone used this with Debian successfully?
> 
> Dunno what the caveats involve, I used Debian in runlevel 3 anyway with
> random kernels.
> 
> | 3.  What do I get with it?  What is at risk?
> |
> | Thanks... I apologize if this info is out there somewhere, but I have
> | spent a significant amount of time digging through past threads, and I'm
> | just not getting a complete picture.
> 
> You can try it out on an SD Card for very low risk.
> 
> The main features are
> 
> ~ - Suspend / Resume changes (should be way more stable)
> ~ - pcf50633 driver rewrite (fixes some troubles)
> ~ - WLAN driver now uses mainline SDIO stack (should fix some probs)
> ~ - Android-ready
> ~ - Kernel features and fixes between 2.6.24 and 2.6.28
> 
> There will be some breakage of features for a while since there are many
> changes to /sys paths used by various things, but the rootfs people
> should catch up soon.

Yesterday i tried to boot debian from sd-card with andy-tracking kernel
version 2d1d9ec0e2d009d0 and it didn't work very well.
First problem was that it seems to lack support for vfat partitions. I
use a 64MB swapfile which is on a vfat partition used by fstab while
booting. But at the point when activating the swap file it hangs and get
a timeout after 120sec and than do nothing.
After i removed the corresponding fstab line it boots up but the
hal-daemon didn't work anymore with the new kernel. Therefore some
things like the oevents from fso doesn't work anymore. This is maybe
related to the changed sysfs structure.
So at the moment i stay at the 2.6.24 openmoko kernel from the daily
build url as long as the userland tools use the old sysfs values.

Ciao,
     Rainer




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