Category: coreboot

This might be not a good idea, but I had got bored with my project not going well, so I eventually got on trip, through “FOSS and friends” 🙂 I have had some headache with nouveau driver, till I understood that deprecated version was installed. Tried to install a package, which got me in a geometric progression of required dependency packages 🙂 I have filed a bug for LibreOffice, and got one future TODO for “reverse enginering” how exactly CUPS works with one of the label printers we have here as it needs a slight modification. The best thing I have done is started reading a book and building “Linux From Scratch (LFS)”. It’s great while building a package you are accompanied with a short page of info about it, not all manual 🙂 Also I have found out that I don’t have good stuff to read, except that 1k pages book about Linux internals 🙂 While looking at the freenode chatrooms list I have found this resource about c language: http://www.iso-9899.info – all it needs is time for reading everything 🙂

My project progress is really slow. As Marc suggested I have done some work to reduce stack usage: wrapped functions to read and use file by 256B peaces (somewhat default granularity). But that still needs testing and cleaning up. Also I need to cleanup my previous work that I haven’t submitted to the list, which enabled running code in car (even though not completely working, as mtrr settings might be wrong or more problems still there).

As stated in my midterm report I’m working this first 2 weeks after midterm to work on building the payload image. I wanted to hardcode everything but we(my mentor and I) understood it would be better to use something like OpenEmbedded for that.

 
This first week I studied OpenEmbedded. I tested many distributions starting with angstrom, they showed too heavy for our purpose. After those tests I found micro and realized it would be a better start.

 
With that I’m working around micro to build our own distro, I’m adding X11 dependencies and right now I’m packing the spice client and its dependencies. In the end of the week I must have sorted every details.

My project mostly involves to build an image with a small linux systemrunning a spice client, the system is attached  with/as a LAB tocoreboot.

What was done

My buildrom tree received some updates and small changes to the building system. The bigest problem to solve was make it build coreboot with the new [k]build system. For that I changed build rom to incorporate the coreboot options so the user can configure every aspects of coreboot – all from buildrom menus. 🙂

For prototyping I used a chroot with a debian bootstrap(debootstrap), this surely doesn`t fit well to the project but I didn`t much attention for that, I thought I could leave it for second half – in the last days talking to my mentor I realized I should have paid more attention to the image things.

With a debootstrap I hacked I small script to package copy that root to my final image, what, once again, doesn`t fit our needs and requirements and here comes the tasks to be taken in the second half.

Second half

The project has been designed to be fully installed in/loaded from flash, It`s loaded with filo(but like discussed with my mentor any other bootload would fit prefectly).

Busybox will be our base system and a x-server. To acomplish that I have to take and finish the following tasks:

• design the building strategies which involves;
  • building the busybox(well, this one is already done once we have a busybox package in buildrom system – I just need to base on that);
  • select the needed x-server componentes(modules – Xlibs, Xprogs, Xvesa);
  • select the alsa packages;
  • include the spice client and its dependencies;
• define the kernel features;
• define how filo is about to load the final image;
• define the best compression algorithm;
• integrate the whole thing to buildrom;
• alix board support;

The base building scripts will be packaged separetely and then integrated to buildrom like the other packages(i.e busybox, filo, grub and so on).

There`re just 6 weeks to the final evaluation and I`m leaving the alix board support to the last 2 weeks.

The build scripts and kernel prototyping will take the 2 first weeks, while the third one I`ll be working to put everything to be built by buildrom, the system can be tested as a proper system from an iso image till I get to integrate it to buildrom and package it as a coreboot payload.

Few weeks ago I got my alix board and today the guys from artecgroup told me my flexyICE is ready for shipping. Below are some pics I took of my alix board:

My very first task on gsoc was to make buildrom work with latest codes from coreboot, with that I changed how it used to build coreboot. First I introduced the coreboot kconfig options to buildrom so the user can configure and choose the options for coreboot in the same mainmenu as buildrom.

 
Some small changes was introduced as a consistent pattern to name the kernel mk files and the possibility to checkout source code with https:// or svn://.
Updated some packages mk files to comply some patterns I introduced.

 
I still have some changes to introduce but I think it`s already usable. I might push the final bits in the next few days whenever I get a chance to work out my patches.