Hello group:
It is my intention to create (or find) a small setup which will sample some
sensors and upload the information via satellite modem to a database server on
the net. That in itself would probably be a task that the 2.4 kernel ts-linux
is well suited to do. However, the organization that is seeking such a system
also wants a camera. For this project it is prohibitively expensive to send
multimedia via the satellite modem, so I thought that using an sdcard (SDHC)
(or usb stick) to store low-res mpegs might work. It seems to me that using a
camera at all would make it very difficult to get a driver which works with the
2.4 linux kernel. (maybe I'm wrong) So I decided to think about a 2.6 kernel
using debian.
I have learned quite a number of things that other newbies might want to know.
First of all, I have learned that not only is the SD card driver proprietary,
only the 2.4 kernel supports SDHC. Second, apparently there is currently no
support for the maverick-crunch FPA using gcc. I don't know if this is
restricted to particular versions, but afaik maverick-crunch support is not
available to 2.6 kernel debian users using any reasonably modern gcc. Third,
cross compiling kernels can be a challenge to newbies.
I have been using ubuntu running in vmware as a linux host. I run vista on my
workstation and windows xp on my laptop. The actual day-one first thing I
found out was that I cannot get vista to recognize the COM ports on my
workstation, and you cannot just use hyperterminal because vista doesn't have
it. Fortunately, I was able to plug in and go with xp and hyperterminal.
I could not get crosstool on the technologic systems website to work in my
linux, and I think it is because the linux is 64 bit and not 32. I could not
test crosstool in cygwin, because I have barfed all over my native gcc and
toolchain in other endeavors to test the 64 bit mingw compiler, so fixdep
wouldn't compile for the linux kernel build. So I had to compile crosstool for
ubuntu 64 bit.
Compiling crosstool was a challenge. I did not have any luck with the tarball,
but after I found svn version of crosstool, things started working. A couple
of things, first the "bash" shell under ubuntu (dash) does work quite right. I
had to use actual bash and symlink /bin/sh to the real bash. Also, apparently,
and not surprisingly you cannot compile gcc with a newer version of itself. So
I had to uninstall gcc-4.3 on ubuntu completely and install gcc-3.4 and symlink
/usr/bin/gcc to it. During compilation of the tarball version of crosstool, I
got an internal compiler error from gcc-3.4. The svn version built though. At
first I compiled gcc-4.1.0-glibc-2.3.2 for some reason, and found out the hard
way that the linux kernel would not compile: error: #error Your version of gcc
miscompiles the __weak directive. So I found an entry in demo-arm.sh for
gcc-4.0.2-glibc-2.3.5-tls.dat and tried that for a compile since the crosstool
from technologic systems was almost the sa
me (gcc-4.0.1). After an hour, crosstool compiled for my vmware x86-64
ubuntu. Again, I tried to compile the kernel, this time the kernel would not
compile because gcc wouldn't accept the -mabi=aapcs-linux. After reading what
this option was I felt it was probably significant, but I didn't feel like
waiting another hour to compile another crosstool version. So I did what any
good hacker would do. I commented it out in the Makefile. The kernel 2.6.29.1
patched with matt's (thank you) patch and configured with
ts7200_eabi_full_defconfig compiled. It loaded into the ts7260 and booted.
Originally I tried the ts72xx_eabi_full_defconfig, and it didn't work, but I
would think it was because I didn't make distclean between monkeying with
crosstool versions.
general notes:
nfsd on vmware is not as responsive as it should be, making any file system
heavy operations time out, too long to be useful (this honestly surprised me)
nfsd on cygwin just couldn't cut it, too much latency during boot causing
kernel panic
franz nfs server: works great but couldn't get tar extract options right on
vista to preserve symbolic links, kernel panic
haven't tried nfsd on dedicated (non-virtual) machine
therefore have been limited to usb stick, which seems to be the common
denominator for the three kernels
If you have a linux x86 machine on the metal that is probably your best bet for
doing nfs. I can boot to ubuntu on my x86 laptop, but it is running off of an
external usb disk, so I dunno how fast nfs would be, but at least I can try the
crosstool from technologic systems and fdisk/mkfs sdcards without using the
7260 itself.
There are pros and cons to every setup:
2.6.29.1-m:
pros: boots to the usb stick, very recent kernel.
cons: can't load tssdcard.ko
notes: dpkg seems not to work in this setup (dpkg 1.10.28):
dpkg: error processing g++-3.3 (--remove):
unable to truncate for updated status of `g++-3.3': File too large
error happens for any package.
Considering there is only 7mb of memory left after everything is running, no
wonder. After shutting down non-essential processes, I couldn't squeeze much
more memory out, still same error.
I went as far as taking a usb stick I was willing to throw away and made it a
swap partition, still same error.
2.6.21-ts:
pros: recent kernel, supported by technologic systems, (almost) loads
tssdcard.ko (I had an SDHC card in there at the time.)
cons: cannot seem to get it to boot to usb stick
notes: dpkg worked with this kernel, albeit prohibitively slow because of nfs.
If I cannot get this kernel to boot usb, then I may just have to boot nfs and
chroot to usb or sdcard. I feel like I need dpkg to do anything with debian.
I'm not good at setting up file systems for one machine from another machine.
I haven't even figured out how to make a proper initrd yet.
I'm wondering if this kernel has compiled in support for the sdcard, and that
may be the real reason why I couldn't load the kernel module all the way?? It
would be nice to boot directly to sdcard or usb with this (avoiding chroot).
2.4-tslinux kernel:
pros: stable, loads sdcard-sdhc.o, supported by technologic systems, usb support
cons: really don't think that I can find a camera driver to work with it for
any camera I can get
I hope this information is useful to other noobs. I also hope that if I am
missing something, more experienced developers would point it out to me.
I thank this group for the posts that let me get this far.
-AKW
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