[ANNOUNCE] qi-bootmenu-0.2

[Marc Andre Tanner]

Hi,

I finally had some time to hack on qi-bootmenu the result is
a new 0.2 release 

 http://www.brain-dump.org/projects/qi-bootmenu/

with the following changes:

 - based on 2.6.34 this should hopefully fix some sd card
   related problems

 - static NAND boot option in the menu, the NAND partition
   is only mounted upon selection so there is no delay for
   sd based boots.

   To make NAND booting work out of the box it would be nice
   if the distros (I tried SHR and QtMoko) could add their
   kernels to the jffs2 images too.

   At the moment you have to ssh into the device mount the
   NAND partition, download their kernel and put it at the
   right place. Something along the lines of: 

    ssh root@$FREERUNNER # the password is empty
    mkdir /mnt/mtdblock6
    mount -t jffs2 /dev/mtdblock6 /mnt/mtdblock6
    mkdir /mnt/mtdblock6/boot && cd /mnt/mtdblock6/boot
    wget $KERNEL
    mv $KERNEL uImage-GTA02.bin

   Bonus points if the distros would place a bootlogo.png
   alongside the kernel (current preferred dimension is
   100x80)

 - visual feedback upon boot selection. There seems to be
   a issue which ocassionally garbles parts of the 
   font/text but I think it's better than before.

 - userspace updated to latest versions including EFL 1.0
   beta release

 - integration of a cross toolchain into the build scripts.
   this should make rebuilding everything a matter of
   executing one shell script. Well at least in theory...

Kernel and Qi ready to flash to your Freerunner can be found at:

 http://www.brain-dump.org/projects/qi-bootmenu/uImage-GTA02-bootmenu-0.2.bin
 http://www.brain-dump.org/projects/qi-bootmenu/qi-s3c2442-bootmenu-0.1.udfu

If you flash the above Qi version, pressing AUX should boot from
NAND and thus present the bootmenu independently of the content
of your sd card. If you don't want to use my patched Qi then
get it to boot from NAND in some other way, for example by putting
noboot-GTA02 files into your sd partitions. Let me know how it
works for you.

The build scripts, in case anyone wants to rebuild the whole
thing, can be found at:

 http://repo.or.cz/w/qi-bootmenu-system.git/snapshot/7c3a92f22e9498198212e4682b2fe078a676f1b5.tar.gz

download and extract the tarball then run ./build.sh this will 
download everything that is needed and then build the kernel +
initramfs. See the README file for further information.

What remains to be done is

 - add ubifs support

 - read partition labels? or some other way to display custom
   text in the menu

 - gta01 support, this basically means kernel support in >= 2.6.34
   the kernel maximum size of 2MB including the initramfs
   should be doable

 - ...

Patches welcome.

Have fun,
Marc

-- 
 Marc Andre Tanner >< http://www.brain-dump.org/ >< GPG key: CF7D56C0