Rebuilding the kernel

[moshiach]

I'm thinking a troubleshooting forum might be a good idea.

Since I'm having so much trouble with the partition sizes in memory, I decided to try my hand at rebuilding the kernel to make it a little smaller and modular.  I'm following the instruction on Compiling the Kernel Wiki and my own intuition and experience.

I've downloaded Codesourcery and installed it.  I've got the git repository from git.marvell.com.  Everything goes great until the actual compilation.  It fails with the completely unhelpful error of   

Code:

LD      .tmp_vmlinux1
`buffer_sync_cleanup' referenced in section `.init.text' of arch/arm/oprofile/built-in.o: defined in discarded section `.exit.text' of arch/arm/oprofile/built-in.o
make: *** [.tmp_vmlinux1] Error 1

Maybe I pulled unstable code? 

[Rabeeh Khoury]

Hi,

What did you mean about -
"I'm thinking a troubleshooting forum might be a good idea." ?

Opening a new forum for this? I was thinking that we can post Q&A on the forum itself, which includes troubleshooting, announcements etc...

Thoughts?

[moshiach]

I just meant a sub forum off of this one, not a completely different forum.   It was just an off the cuff remark.

Still having difficulty rebuilding the kernel though.

[axman5389]

Hi,

What did you mean about -
"I'm thinking a troubleshooting forum might be a good idea." ?

Opening a new forum for this? I was thinking that we can post Q&A on the forum itself, which includes troubleshooting, announcements etc...

Thoughts?

I think this forum is a great idea.  So far, the forum contributors have been great at trying to help each other.  But some things seem to be just beyond our grasp - maybe with some contribution from knowledgeable Marvell or GlobalScale persons, the forum will be enough (by itself) to help users solve their Sheeva Plug issues.

Note that I do not at all demean the level of expertise represented by the contributors.  But each person has their own set of issues / aspects that they are trying to solve.  When problems align for multiple users, the combined brainpower seems to render a solution that applies to more than one user.

I personally am still struggling, and posts to several different forums in addition to this one have me no closer to a solution.  I'm not complaining about Marvell, nor about GlobalScale.  Just struggling.  The PlugWiki has 'almost' enough docs to give a reasonably linux-experienced person enough to do things.  But when unpredictable results occur, and the personal level of linux-experience is maxed out, it's frustrating.

This is a great product, with a huge amount of promise.  I hope this support forum can grow and be robust to the point where most problems can be solved without relying too heavily on the professionals (at Marvell / GlobalScale.)

Just my .02
thanks

[Rabeeh Khoury]

So how can we really make things easier? I'm looking for practical things we can do.

Note that the wiki pages are getting more and more information; I agree with you that today's information is mostly when things work fine and less when disaster happens.

I'm thinking of expanding the "Install Distributions" section to the following -

+ Linux stuff
+--- Kernel Q/A and troubleshoot
+--- Distribution installation Q/A
+--- General Linux on ARM troubleshoot

Any other suggestions?

[moshiach]

Those sound fine to me.

[gstratton]

Rabeeh,

For me, a better overview of the system would help a lot. I think I'm getting there now, but something explaining how u-boot, the kernel and the filesystem fit together would be useful. Maybe something along the lines of this (with the no-doubt many factual errors corrected; if I knew I'd write the wiki pages):

u-boot is the first thing to run on bootup. It loads the kernel. Link to information about installing u-boot and configuration settings. How to compile u-boot and write to flash.

The kernel can either be loaded from flash, USB(?) or via TFTP. Linux 2.6.22 is supported, and 2.6.30rc1 has been shown to work too. Link to how to compile kernel, kernel sources and binaries, and how to write kernel to flash. Describe how to set up TFTP.

The filesystem can either be loaded from a JFFS2 filesystem on flash, a USB partition or a NFS mount. Ubuntu JFFS2 images are provided (is the 9.05 one broken?). Meamo (link) can be used to mount JFFS2 filesystems. Describe how to create a JFFS2 filesystem for a new OS and how to write it to flash. Describe how to set up NFS.