[debian] Re: How stupid I was to choose vfat for /boot

Andy Green andy at openmoko.com
Thu Nov 20 09:38:28 CET 2008


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Somebody in the thread at some point said:

| I get it, Qi expects the kernel to be on the same partition as the
| root file system, unlike that created by the Debian install.sh script.

Yes exactly.

| Conclusions: Debian team: notice that you'll have to ln or cp to
| uImage-GTA02.bin and not just uImage.bin to match Qi, and of course it
| should all be on the same partition... root and boot.

There's another issue here to take note... the reason that Qi now has
the device-specific kernel name is that there is an increasing number of
devices that are interested in these same rootfs now.  GTA01, GTA02,
GTA03 and eventually Glofiish and whatever else turns up can actually
all use the same stock armv4 rootfs eventually, with kernels prebuilt
into it for all supported devices: the bootloader will take the right
kernel.

So it means you can aim for one rootfs image for all devices, and even
move an SD Card with the image between say GTA02 and GTA03.

| As for booting into Debian from NOR, hmmm, well if Qi skips vfat
| partitions, then we can still have that too.

Yes.

| Several misconceptions on http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Qi , "I'll try
| to clear them up".

Yes, thanks for cleaning it.

| And Qi team: please turn on the verbosity, starting at the purple
| screen can come after you've sold your first gold or platinum record
| album of a telephone.
|
| I don't suppose Qi is flexible like grub2 or whatever, so we will just
| have to cater to where it puts things.

The U-Boot environment did not seem a good thing to me after GTA02
experience, so I deliberately removed all persistent state private to
the bootloader, its behaviour is deterministic then.  We literally had
two devices from same factory with same nuked bootloader, kernel and
rootfs that acted different by different U-Boot env, that is not what we
need.

I have patches above what's in git that introduce a "UI key" concept
that you can control whether a "debugging" kernel commandline is used at
boottime by holding down Aux, but unfortunately Qi dies if you use Aux
right now with or without the patches, so solving the need for feedback
about panic on LCM is "coming".

- -Andy
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