Openmoko to shift to 2.6.27 kernel ?

[Joel Newkirk]

On Wed, 15 Oct 2008 15:14:28 +0200, "Christ van Willegen"
<cvwillegen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Andy,
> 
> On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 2:29 PM, Andy Green <andy at openmoko.com> wrote:
>> If you're interested to visit the "edge" and know how to DFU stuff
>> around with NOR to get yourself in and out of trouble, you can get a
>> "moredrivers" kernel here
>>
>>
>
http://people.openmoko.org/andy/uImage-moredrivers-andy-tracking_2ffb4cc483642df1.bin
> 
> I dfu-util'led this into my 'kernel' partition, and also the qi image
> into by u-boot.
> 
> After that, the red led started flashing. IIRC that means that there
> is no kernel to boot. I then panicked and replaced the u-boot with the
> one from OM20080917. That didn't help, so I also DFU'd the kernel from
> OM20080917. That fixed my phone (I could boot again!), but I'm left
> wondering what I did wrong...
> 
> AFAIK I can just do 'sudo dfu-util -D
> uImage-moredrivers-andy-tracking_2ffb4cc483642df1.bin -a kernel -R' to
> flash your kernel, but that may not be the case...
> 
> Christ van Willegen (who sometimes likes to be on the edge, and will
> re-flash with QI again tonight...)
> 

No, as I found out and Andy confirmed several messages back in this thread.
 His 2.6.27 kernel image has issues running from NAND, has to be on uSD. 
Qi will boot from any kernel named 'uImage.bin' in the /boot folder in the
root of an ext2/ext3 partition - first partition - on the uSD.  failing to
find that, it will boot from the kernel in NAND, but that  an't be the
current 2.6.27 uImage.


Also, I wanted to revisit this thread to post some stopwatch results on Qi
(error is approx ±1/2 second):

Booting SHR image with uBoot:
0:00 power button held down
0:07 splash screen appears
0:15 drops to console showing kernel messages scrolling by for ~1 minute
1:18 Openmoko 'please wait' splash
1:31 desktop animated splash
2:38 finished booting

Booting identical setup with Qi flashed over uBoot:
0:00 power button held down
0:06 backlit black
0:13 please wait booting... (only this text on console for next 38 seconds)
0:51 Angstrom console message (at the end of kernel output with uBoot, but
ONLY text display to appear throughout this stage with Qi)
0:54 Openmoko 'please wait' splash
1:05 desktop animated splash
1:54 finished booting

So for this particular configuration, it reduced time-to-desktop by about
28%, about 44 seconds.  I was pleasantly surprised to see that the later
segments of booting (desktop) were also noticeably faster than with uBoot -
I'd expected just the fist stages up until init (kernel finished
establishing itself) to be faster.  My previously-posted estimate of boot
time improvement was based on the appearance of the post-kernel splash -
'please wait' in the case of SHR - not then noticing improvements later in
the boot process.

I'll be thrilled if we can get it under one minute, preferably with GSM
powered up at the earliest possible point, and maybe putting up a dialer
instead of a splash screen.  (something like 25 seconds to dial, 60 seconds
for full system finished loading)

(Note that I still have the problem where Qi won't boot the 'first try'
after power restored - I didn't count that first 10 seconds for Qi to be
fair to its booting speed, not penalize it for what appears to be a bug
that bears no relation to actual boot speed)

j