Hi,
Eddie Dawydiuk <> [20080624 14:57:36 -0700]:
>
> > What I will side on you
> > though, TS might have wanted to do a little more legwork on the RT side of
> > things before declaring things "great and prosperous"[1].
>
> What RT features would you like to see Technologic System back port to
> 2.6.21? Are there any bugs/problems you know of that would imply the
> page you referenced is misleading or incorrect?[1]
>
Okay I admit, I'm being a bit lame and you called my bluff whilst I had my
trousers down :-/ Apologies. I personally could not care about RT issues,
although I enjoy coding, I just want a silent board that routes IPv6 traffic.
To be really honest all the RT problems[1] are just a latent "back of the
mind" grumbling in regards to the SD card and TS-BOOTROM incorrect platform
ID malarkey. Not much you can do about the former[2] though...
> As we all know Linux is under constant development, new features are
> constantly being added. It would be great if Technologic Systems would
> back port every new feature in Linux. But unfortunately the
> managers/business people tell us it's not economical to do this.
> Although the great thing about open source is you don't have to rely on
> a vendor to solve all of your problems. You can back port these new
> features yourself. You can then share them with the community and
> everyone can benefit. It would be great if a vendor could be all things
> to all people, but thats just not possible.
>
yeah, I'm starting to sound like j.chitte or whatever his/her name was.. :-/
> It's great that people like yourself are interested in getting the
> TS-7800 mainline, I think it's a very noble effort. Please keep in mind
> Technologic Systems is here to support you as well as all of its
> customers if you/they have any problems or questions. Please let us know
> if you find any bugs or strange behavior, we are more than happy to fix
> them.
>
You have been 80% excellent on that front, only issues is that one or two of
my emails have been /dev/null'd or slow on a reply; however I have only sent
a small (five-ish) number so it's hardly building a conclusion on that.
> > Also if they fixed that damn trivial bug in TS-BOOTROM to pass the real
> > platform ID would have been nice without the world having to resort to
> > ugly hacks[2] :-/
>
> What is the failure condition? Is the problem that Linux 2.6.x doesn't
> like the way Technologic Systems code base handles machine IDs and
> wouldn't except it mainline?
>
Well...in a single statement(s):
http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/developer/booting.php
http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/developer/machines/
http://marc.info/?t=121361319400002&r=1&w=2
To obtain a machine ID is 30 seconds of filling in a form and you are given
your official number instantly after you hit the submit button. Seems
however *every* ARM dev board out there with it's bootloader is typically
borken...even my GP2X :( Afraid I'll grind my teeth on that but the damage
is already done...
The effect is that after compiling a kernel *everyone* has to use a script to
insert some assembler so that the first instruction loads the correct machine
ID into r1 of the CPU before Linux kicks in.
===========
:~$ cat /usr/src/ts7800/prep-kernel
#!/bin/sh
(
devio 'wl 0xe3a01c06,4' 'wl 0xe3811074,4'
cat /usr/src/ts7800/ts78xx.git/arch/arm/boot/zImage
) | dd of=/dev/mmcblk0p1
exit 0
===========
Not the end of the world, but demoralising.
Maybe for future boards you will make this part of your development routine,
meanwhile you'll have to live with me being the official registrar of your
hardware...muh ha ha ha. Downside, guess I'll be getting the whining users
:)
> Please keep in mind one of our primary concerns as an industrial SBC
> vendor is reliability. Technologic Systems doesn't typically make
> changes to there design unless there is a good reason to do so.
>
Noted. Thumbs up for 'slapping' me down, I'm picking on minuscule details
that are more an inconvenience rather than a ball-buster. Exactly what I
grumbled at j.chitte regarding.
> >> Lastly, has anyone else's TS-7800 been running (use the ts-7800ctl
> >> odometer) for under -16,000,000 hours?
> >>
> > Yeah, that was my first hint that ts7800ctl had some 'fruity' logic in it
> > and might have not been as well tested as one hoped :)
>
> If you find a bug please let us know. We would like to be notified about
> any such bugs so we can fix them.
>
My fault, I ask the same of my lusers, makes sense I should follow my own
requests... :(
I have found the 'sleep' code a bit fruity. From what I can tell you have
implemented your own watchdog using the Amtel mega48 chip? Actually I could
be talking out of my ass on that one but when I try the 'sleep' functionality
the board seems to soft-reset roughly after the timer expires. This however
is:
* with the orion5x kernel I'm working on
* with the *Orion* built-in watchdog enabled
* using your ts7800ctl code
Technically are there two watchdogs on the board, yours and the Orion one?
I'm only guessing as it looks like the microsecond timer you added is defunct
being that the two orion nanosecond accurate timers are there? A guess in
the dark is that you were more comfortable with your own hardware
implementations than the Mavell supplied ones? Same applies for DMA, any
reason the Mavell DMA engines (all four of them) could not be used on your
NAND? This I'm asking as one day I plan to build a driver that hooks the
Marvell DMA engines to the DMA offloading framework (along with the crypto
and XOR accelerators)...the FPGA based DMA thingy seems kinda out of place.
Cheers, and apologies again for being a muppet... :-/
Alex
[1] I'm not an (RT) kernel developer...did you guess? :)
[2] it's a cash-cow, you deserve the cash as the hardware is really nice, but
I just hoped the stable userspace API for Linux drivers could have
(or is a planned TBA?) been utilised approach to dealing with the
SD card in an opensource kernel....<hope/>
--
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