[Om2009] a community effort

Paul Fertser fercerpav at gmail.com
Sun May 31 16:15:24 CEST 2009


On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 03:47:04PM +0800, William Kenworthy wrote:
> Not sure - raised it with Andy directly when he asked for comments - but
> it was not going to be fixed as it was "works for me" (booting failures)
> - this being him.  And, as you know he was very against Qi printing
> anything informative to the user as it would take time and Qi was about
> speed, not "correctness" - my impression based on Andy's comments.

It prints enough debug info via serial line. And printing to LCM (esp. if
it's that hard as with gta02) is basically a misfeature for a bootloader.

What do you suggest?

> As far as I am aware its not maintained, 

If you have some particular problem i will put my time into fixing it, so
it is maintained. As was proved by recent addition of SDHC support to
gta01.

> time trying it because the wiki still says "A short press on the power
> button is enough to make Qi start booting. In a few seconds the
> backlight will be lit, but the kernel will not spew any console messages
> unless something is wrong. It may take up to 2 minutes (depends on
> distribution) until X is started during which there will be no visual
> feedback. Please be patient." - that is just plain broken from a user
> perspective and in my case, wasted time as it didnt always reliably
> start when pressing the powerbutton.

It also uses AUX led to indicate process, if you use it in the simplest
case (boot kernel from 1st SD partition), the AUX led will blink twice and
it means that it worked. If the kernel can't do what it needs to do -- not
a bootloader problem.

And on GTA02 i've implemented (and it still works reliably) a feature to
see kernel debugging messages on LCM (with loglevel=8) if you're holding
the power button just before Qi is about to boot kernel.

So to me your comments seem to be void, sorry.

> Why am I so negative - lost an important call when the FR didnt boot
> when it should have - due to Qi.

Losing a call on FR due to a bootloader? Very worrying, indeed.

> I am just not prepared to stare at the FR for in excess of 2 minutes to
> see if it boots before getting on with life.  The wiki suggests looking
> for the backlight ... what a joke, ever tried doing that in daylight/real
> life?

Look at AUX led. Enable whichever loglevel for kernel you like. Boot a
minimal kernel that will boot really fast.

Not a bootloader problem.

-- 
Be free, use free (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html) software!
mailto:fercerpav at gmail.com




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