I’m trying to get a Beaglebone or equal in the future if I will find the time.

After getting a lot of traffic (according to google analytics) on the pandaboard kernel topic i recently decided to add another post about that.

As I’m currently stuck in my project with some strange USB driver problem, I had time to checkout all the new cool kernel stuff in the 3.X branch.
After drooling around in the web I found a link to Robert C. Nelsons stuff over at github.
It looks like he is really into kernel developing and also a fan of the OMAP branch which is great news for us noob or semi-noob guys. He is supplying a lot of scripts and patches that fix bugs in the original mainline stable kernel sources automagically (that’s the point!) for us.

In this post I’ll try to write a step-by-step guide in using his stuff.

So first, the kernel.

Go to your home directory

Get Roberts latest release from github

Now change into the new folder and get the latest torvalds mainline kernel source from kernel.org

This can take some time… So time for coffee!

To compile anything you need you have to setup a cross compiling toolchain or do it natively on the board (no good idea though)… I’m assuming that here.

Next is to rename the config file

and edit it

Though we are cross-compiling at that point, you have to uncomment the lines (around line 25 and 42)
#CC=arm-none-linux-gnueabi-
and
#LINUX_GIT=/path/to/source
As you can see, you have to edit the last uncommented line and add the path to the kernel mainline sources. If you are using your home folder this would be something like
LINUX_GIT=/home/user/stable-kernel/linux-stable

There are two possible ways in the stable-kernel folder:
* build_kernel.sh
* build_deb.sh
As the filename is implicating, one builds only the kernel and the other one makes a debian installer (.deb). As I’m currently using Ubuntu Oneiric on my pandaboard a deb file comes in very handy…
But the basic script only creates a zImage of the kernel, which I’m not using in uboot – so I added two lines to the build bash scripts:

This will always execute the menuconfig option where you can edit the kernel settings and later also make the uImage required by uboot.

Last step is to get another cup of coffee or maybe a rig with more potential cpu power…

Currently, Robert has already ported version 3.1.1! Really great job!

After the script has finished you can use the new uImage and .deb file.
i.e. the uImage can be found in KERNEL/arch/arm/boot/ and the .tar.gz and .debs for kernel/header can be found in “deploy”.

Enjoy!

Well, because of the whole JAVA background, minecraft is not very ressource saving, so plan to get a “good” enough server. If you are hosting it at home, don’t even think about ATOM or stuff, just go for a small AMD Dual Core or Intel Sandy Bridge system. It consumes some more power, but it’s worth it. If you are using a old system and want to host some more players, take a dualcore with minimum of 2 GHZ and 2-4GB of Ram to get it quite fluently. HDD is between 20-80GB, depending on the size and players of your world.

Well, I setup a new Ubuntu 10.04 server from scratch and updated the basics to their latest packages. So that it’s ready to get to the minecraft part.
As a quick start get those packages:

To get the needed Java binaries/packages, you will need to add a repository to your apt. Do this by

and add the following two lines to it:
deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu lucid partner
deb-src http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu lucid partner
If you are running any other version of ubuntu than 10.04 than take a look at the different pathes

Now you need to update your package lists again and download the packages:

The packages are around ~70MB huge, so dependent of your internet connection you may take a coffee break…

Check that java is correctly install with

and should see something like this:
java version "1.6.0_26"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_26-b03)
J ava HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 20.1-b02, mixed mode, sharing)

Now download the minecraft server with

and start the server with

Now all the config files, scripts and the start world will be generated. Now your basic server should be available. Just open your Minecraft client, connect to the server ip and after joining the world, enter “op” into the server console, so that you are allowed to build.

That’s it. Maybe more tutorials about configs are coming soon.

Thanks to firestorm for his older blog post, which I mostly adopted to my case.

I’m using a Ubuntu 10.04.03 x86 server OS for those development purposes because I’ve best experiences with Long Term Supported Ubuntu distris.

Attention: If you are setting up the system right now, make sure you have enough disk space. I didn’t do “much” things and reached the 50GB limit of my VHDD easily…

I’m assuming that your system (or at least mine here) is fresh installed and blank. So first get all available updates for everything installed at the moment:

Now get the building essential things:

Maybe you want to add some useful stuff as well:

Now go to the directory where you want to have everything (and remember the needed disk space!) and get the obenembedded basic things via git:

Note: A good reference for the whole part ist located on the openembedded Website, check it out if you’re having problems!

Second step is to create your config. Create the directory build on the same level as openembedded. Create then the directory conf under build. A easy start is to use the sample config already provided by openembedded under “openembedded/conf/local.conf.sample” and copy it to your build directory. Rename it to match “local.conf” and edit the following things in it to match them to your wanted config.

In my case I want support for the pandaboard, so we have to change the following Variables:
DL_DIR = "/build/OE/sources"
BBFILES := "/build/OE/openembedded/recipes/*/*.bb"
MACHINE = "omap4430-panda"
DISTRO = "angstrom-2010.x"
IMAGE_FSTYPES = "tar"
BB_NUMBER_THREADS = "4"
BBINCLUDELOGS = "yes"

I’m using the pandaboard, a Angstrom base root fs and the main directory “build” for all stuff. Set the threads variable according to the number of CPU cores you have available, so that compiling doesn’t take ages…

Next step is to get “bitbake” which is a kind of “apt” on the debian side. Openembedded serves you “recipes” for both “packages” and “images”. So images are some kind of a summary of what packages are needed for a purpose (i.e. x11-image makes you a small Xorg root fs). Bitbake is the program, that reads the recipes, “cooks” them and packages them into a .tar for you.

There is a ubuntu package available, but I will use the newest version here. So just get it from <HERE>, in my case 1.12:

and untar it into your openembedded directory.

The last step is now to get bitbake into your environmental settings, so just execute those two things every time you want to use it or put them into your unix profile settings:

Now you can do your first cooking or baking or what the hell you may ever call it:

Just fyi: It took me an hour on my 2600K CPU… And afterwards the hdd looked like

gr3yh0und@ubuntu:/build/OE$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1             9.4G  1.9G  7.1G  21% /
none                 1003M  188K 1003M   1% /dev
none                 1007M     0 1007M   0% /dev/shm
none                 1007M   56K 1007M   1% /var/run
none                 1007M     0 1007M   0% /var/lock
none                 1007M     0 1007M   0% /lib/init/rw
/dev/sdb1              99G   24G   71G  25% /build

If you are running into the error
ERROR: Openembedded's config sanity checker detected a potential misconfiguration.
Either fix the cause of this error or at your own risk disable the checker (see sanity.conf).
Following is the list of potential problems / advisories:
Using dash as /bin/sh causes various subtle build problems, please use bash instead.
ERROR: Command execution failed: Exited with 1

then you will need to reconfigure your dash with:

and select <NO> !

The first time it will take like ages because bitbake will need to download all sources, build the corresponding toolchains etc… So maybe get SOME cups of coffee this time…

But now for the installation part: It’s already very well documented on the Ubuntu site and also on OMAPPedia, but I think i could give it a small Post.

Preparation

First step is to download the wanted image from the Ubuntu website (over here). The newest atm is 11.04 and I chose the headless version because I don’t want to connect one of my 3 monitors here to the DVI port of the pandaboard – But use my 7″ USB Touchscreen instead! So the headless version gives me the ability to go through the normal Ubuntu installation process via a textbash and a serial cable. Great!

Download the image:

Be sure to get the “omap4″ version, not the “omap” version which is used for OMAP generations 1-3. (pandaboard has 4430!)

Next step is to insert a SD Card in your card reader (equal/greater than 4GB). I’m using a Sandisk Ultra III 4GB here for maximum speed. Check if it is getting mounted with

If it got mounted, unmount it with

where X is the letter of your drive.
Now copy the complete installation with the command:

This can take some time, so lay back or get another cup of coffee.
root@ubuntu:/panda# time sh -c 'zcat ubuntu-11.04-preinstalled-headless-armel+omap4.img.gz > /dev/sdc'
real 1m53.957s
user 1m1.932s
sys 0m1.732s

Great thing about that image is, that things like X-Loader, U-Boot (Both bootloaders), kernel and filesystem are all included. So it’s simply downloaded, cloning to SD and having fun… Pretty straight forward!

BootUp

Plug in your SD Card and power up the Board. The first output will look like this:
Texas Instruments X-Loader 1.5.0 (Apr 11 2011 - 09:48:22)
Reading boot sector
Loading u-boot.bin from mmc

U-Boot 2011.03 (Apr 20 2011 - 07:37:43)
CPU : OMAP4430
Board: OMAP4 Panda
I2C: ready
DRAM: 1 GiB
MMC: OMAP SD/MMC: 0
Using default environment
In: serial
Out: serial
Err: serial
Hit any key to stop autoboot: 0
reading boot.scr
350 bytes read
Running bootscript from mmc0 ...
3467529 bytes read
## Booting kernel from Legacy Image at 80000000 ...

Image Name: Ubuntu Kernel
Image Type: ARM Linux Kernel Image (uncompressed)
Data Size: 4174676 Bytes = 4 MiB
Load Address: 80008000
Entry Point: 80008000
Verifying Checksum ... OK
## Loading init Ramdisk from Legacy Image at 81600000 ...
Image Name: Ubuntu Initrd
Image Type: ARM Linux RAMDisk Image (gzip compressed)
Data Size: 3467465 Bytes = 3.3 MiB
Load Address: 00000000
Entry Point: 00000000
Verifying Checksum ... OK
Loading Kernel Image ... OK
OK

Starting kernel ...
Uncompressing Linux... done, booting the kernel.
Caching vfat content in /dev/.initramfs/jasper-vfat ...
Resizing root partition ...
Re-writing vfat partition ...
Resizing root filesystem. Please wait, this will take a moment ...
Resizing root filesystem ...
Checking filesystem before resizing...
Resizing, please wait...
Resizing, pass: 1 [100/100]Enabling serial console login
Setting up fstab
Setting up swap
Enabling oem-config
Writing flash-kernel configuration
Creating bootloader configuration
Rebooting into configuration session
[ 55.207000] Restarting system.

fsck from util-linux-ng 2.17.2
/dev/mmcblk0p2: clean, 45081/481440 files, 299174/975948 blocks
[ 6.315979] (stk) :line disc installation timed out
[ 7.487854] (stk) :line disc installation timed out
[ 8.597198] (stk) :line disc installation timed out
[ 9.714385] (stk) :line disc installation timed out
[ 10.823760] (stk) :line disc installation timed out
[ 11.933135] (stk) :line disc installation timed out
[ 13.042510] (stk) :line disc installation timed out
* Starting AppArmor profiles [ OK ]
[ 14.151885] (stk) :line disc installation timed out
[ 15.253448] (stk) :line disc installation timed out
[ 16.362823] (stk) :line disc installation timed out
[ 17.472229] (stk) :line disc installation timed out
[ 17.477447] fmdrv: Failed to get ST write func pointer
[ 17.483489] (stc): chnl_id 8 not registered
[ 17.487823] fmdrv: Unable to prepare FM CORE

After a reboot the installation itself will take place and a funny windows will load (here on putty):

Continue with your normal installation and select the appropriate packages you want to install (i.e. openssh server etc)

For further info about headless installation and the beagleboard, visit the Ubuntu WIKI.

So after unpacking the pandaboard, my first intention was to update all available bootloaders. Though I recently also ordered a Beagleboard, i knew already what to do. OMAP platforms are nearly equivalent in this case because all are produced (or are still I should say if Broadcom really wants to buy TI) by Texas Instruments.

Long story short: There is plenty of information about bootloaders for OMAP platforms spread across the web but I strangled because I had different sources, some patched, some not and a lot of work with the SD card format. Well there are several tutorials for that part, but that doesn’t mean that it’s easy…

So the main mechanism for booting up the Pandaboard are simply 4 Steps:
X-Loader (first bootloader) -> U-Boot (second bootloader) -> Kernel -> Root Filesystem

Because the pandaboard doesn’t have any NAND memory chips onboard, you will need to use a separate SD Card for bootloaders. You can also locate the rootfs on that SD card, but look out that you get at least a 8 der 16GB large which is at minimum specified as class 10 – Or your system will run very sluggish! (which made me depressive at one point, so I switched to sandisk extreme III)

Notice: Though the pandaboard is a ARM based device, you will have to set up a cross compiling toolchain for this. There is another entry on how to do this . I’m assuming for the following commands, that you have added the toolchain directory to your PATH environment variable with i.e.:

Step 1: SD Card Format

To make it as fast and easy as possible, some clever guy wrote the omap3-mkcard.sh script. This makes it pretty simple: Get it, insert your SD Card, make sure to check using “dmesg” that it is loaded/available and check the path (i.e. sdb/sdc/sdd…)

Maybe you check

to make sure you have all needed commando tools.

Then simply execute it with (I’m using sdb as path here)

and it will do everything for you. If you get some errors about unknown commandos, check the web and install the needed packages that give you those commands/programs.

It can also be possible that you will get some errors. In my case it was because of a missing dd command or whatever and the partition table on the SD Card got corrupted. To reset the partition table simply do a
fdisk /dev/sdb
o
w
The command “o” will create a new DOS like partition table. After that, everything worked fine for me.

If you are having trouble with preparing the SD Card, have a glance at the SD Configuration over at OMAPPedia.

Step 2: Compile X-Loader

X-Loader is the small bootloader from TI which just initializes basic features of the board itself. X-Loader is kind of limited and so it simply prepares the hardware and loads U-Boot for further commands. How the complete process works is pretty well explained by the guys over at OMAPPEDIA.

To get the X-Loader sources simple get it via git

enter the directory and load the default pandaboard config with

Now create the binary with

It should now lie in the same directory as the sources, named “MLO”. At the moment, the newest version is 1.5.1.

Step 3: Compile U-Boot

Now you have to compile U-Boot from its sources. Either you choose the official U-Boot release tgzs/git or you use the git tree from the same gitorious account:

Then create the config from the default config

and in the last step build the binary again with

If you are using the latest U-Boot git from denx, then you will get an error atm (20.08.2011) about a too huge cluster size of the SRAM part. There is already a patch available here which will hopefully will be soon upstream. To use it, copy everything to a textfile (i.e. using vim and name it SRAM.patch) and execute it via

There should now be a file called u-boot.bin flying around in the same directory…

A really good reference about U-Boot and X-Loader is the guy over at elinux.org, check it out!

U-Boot is a relly nice tool and THE bootloader available. Fun fact is, that it’s creator lives in the town next to mine and I’m hopefully looking forward to drink a cup of coffee with him one day.

Step 4: Kernel

To boot up you also need a kernel. You can build your own or use a precompiled one, whatever you like. For my project i needed some adjustments and stuff, so I chose to build it by myself. I chose the latest version (3.0.2 to that point) due to a few OMAP bugfixes in there. You can read about the progress and my config in the other blog entry here. You can also download the precompiled binary there for a quickstart…

Step 5: Root Filesystem

To do anything useful with your device, you’ll also need a root filesystem. There are various options on the web on how to get one… i.e. you can use the angstrom one or, what I did, create your own with the great buildroot suite. This is really a very well designed and up to date suite to build and deploy filesystems of any kind. I will write another article about that later…

Step 6: Finalize SD Card

The final part is to copy everything over to your in step 1 already prepared SD card. Now comes the important part: The order is the key! The script created you 2 partitions, one for the bootloaders/kernel and one for the filesystem. You can also boot the kernel from the second partition or load the filesystem over the network via NFS as explained here.

• The first file you need to copy is the “MLO” from X-Loader. This HAS TO BE the first file as it is the primary bootloader and the system just looks on the first few cluster on the SD Card to find it!
• The second file is the “u-boot.bin” and the third file is the kernel, “uImage”.
• The root system has now to be untared to the second partition or the NFS server needs to be configured

This should be it for the start. Put your SD Card in the slot of your pandaboard, connect a serial cable/USB-Serial adapter to the pandaboard and power it up. You should now see the loading screens of X-Loader, U-Boot and the kernel! After 30 seconds, the rootfs should be loaded und you should be able to login. Have fun!

If theres something wrong/trouble or there is a way how I can do anything smarter, just drop me a comment. I’m open for every single advice!

In the development of my project i also need to get a fast and working kernel for the pandaboard. As I searched the web, there were several old and new infos about how – but I couldn’t find a defconfig for it. My first goal after unpacking was simply: Get it working instantly!!111

At this point, a advice would be to visit the HowTo List at elinux, where the newest (and also old) kernels and their How To’s are listed. The list is pretty decent at that point and includes a lot of patches which are still not merged into mainline kernel!

I’m currently working with 3.0.2, the latest final build available atm. For a start, I will post the default config I use atm. But beware – I’m far from testing all functions and drivers, i just checked the parts I thought would be useful. Download it to your kernel dir and rename it to .config

Download kernel config

Download kernel uImage precompiled

Download U-Boot 2011-06 precompiled

Download X-Loader 1.51 precompiled

Checked working:

• LAN Network
• serial console
• USB Displaylink
• Webcams

Last update: 29/8/2011

Next step is getting 3.0.4 and then, when available, 3.1 to work.

I will keep that file up to date as far as possible and as far as my projects develops…

Thanks to the guys over at pandaboard.org for linking!

So to make things hopefully shorter for you, here a quick tutorial how to do all that stuff.

Kernel

First step is our kernel. I’m using the 3.0.2 final which is atm the newest stable release. The guys commited a lot for the omap branch there, especially OMAP4 which is used on Pandaboard. But I’m really not sure, why the kernelguys are not making more defconfigs for starters. Sure they must not be perfect, but simple things like networking should work out of the box…

So go to your development machine and get the 3.0.2 sources from kernel.org and untar them:

Now make a OMAP-generic default config (defconfig) and edit it (I’m assuming, that you have downloaded/untared/exported the path of i.e. the CodeSourcery Cross Compiler Toolchain):

Because of the generic type of this defconfig, you have to do some manual changes to get everything working. This can easily done by selecting via the ncurse-based “menuconfig” command.
Make sure that the following point are selected ([*] in front of it):

Networking support
--> [*] TCP/IP networking
--> --> [*] IP: kernel level autoconfiguration
--> --> --> [*] IP: DHCP support
--> --> --> [*] IP: BOOTP support
--> --> --> [*] IP: RARP support

Device Drivers
--> [*] Network device support
--> --> USB Network Adapters
--> --> --> [*] SMSC LAN95XX based USB 2.0 10/100 ethernet devices
--> [*] USB support
--> --> [*] EHCI HCD (USB 2.0) support

File systems
--> [*] Network File Systems
--> --> NFS client support
--> --> --> [*] NFS client support for NFS version 3 --> [*] Root file system on NFS

Or do it via bash by checking the .config in the same dir for those variables enabled ( XXX=y ):
CONFIG_IP_PNP=y
CONFIG_IP_PNP_DHCP=y
CONFIG_IP_PNP_BOOTP=y
CONFIG_IP_PNP_RARP=y
CONFIG_USB_USBNET=y
CONFIG_USB_NET_SMSC95XX=y
CONFIG_USB=y
CONFIG_USB_SUPPORT=y
CONFIG_USB_ARCH_HAS_EHCI=y
CONFIG_NETWORK_FILESYSTEMS=y
CONFIG_NFS_FS=y
CONFIG_NFS_V3=y
CONFIG_NFS_V3_ACL=y
CONFIG_ROOT_NFS=y

Now build your kernel and (according to the number of CPU Cores in your system) change the number behind “j”:

Now your kernel is ready to be used!
I’m assuming here, that you already have a clue how to setup the SD Card right and have U-boot and X-Loader correctly in place. I will make further tutorials on that, too – later!

NFS Server

To use NFS, your development system also needs the NFS server to be installed. On debian systems you can install it simply with

The next step is to create the folder (here /panda/fs) for the filesystem and make it ready for “export”.
Edit the /etc/exports to match your config:
/panda/fs 192.168.1.0/24(rw,sync,no_root_squash,no_subtree_check)
I allow all adresses in this IP Range to access the NFS, due to multiple systems on the network. If you are changing the config and want to reload it, restart the nfs server with

My development System/NFS-Server is using 192.168.1.1 and pandaboard uses the 192.168.1.2 .

U-Boot

Now copy the kernel from arch/arm/boot/uImage over to your SD Card partition 1 and connect your board to a serial cable. Get into U-Boot and enter the following commands to make a network boot:
mmc rescan
fatload mmc 0:1 0x80000000 uImage
setenv bootargs vram=32M console=ttyO2,115200 mem=456M@0x80000000 mem=512M@0xA0000000 smsc95xx.macaddr=76:2F:97:85:4F:56 root=/dev/nfs rw nfsroot=192.168.1.1:/panda/fs,nolock,wsize=1024,rsize=1024 ip=192.168.1.2 rootdelay=2 init=/linuxrc
bootm 0x80000000

Change here the arguments to fit it to your system, i.e. change the MAC Address of your NIC, the IP Address of your server if necessary (nfsroot=X.X.X.X) and the folder (here /panda/fs).
The second IP beginning with “ip=” is the IP address your board will choose after kernel has started up. You can also assign DHCP as choice here (ip=DHCP) – No subnetmask is needed.

To make this executed every boot, you have to create a new textfile on your development system called “boot.script”. Copy your boot commands into it and save it. Then convert it to a file namend “boot.scr” with the command:

and copy it over to your SD Cards first partition. It will then be executed as first action first by U-Boot on every boot.

Note: If mkimage is not found, install it with “sudo apt-get install uboot-mkimage”!

Et voila! Thanks to the guys over at Googleboard for the startup.

mal ein paar Beispiele:

• Bei manchen Kaltstarts hat er das Bios zerschossen (F10) und das vom Rettungsbios (F8d) neu geflasht. Darum hatte ich immer einen USB Stick dran, um gleich wieder das F10 + Einstellungen zu laden.
• Ramprobleme: Manchmal werden 4GB, manchmal 6GB erkannt. Logik ist dabei keine. Scheinen wohl einige Gigabyte Boards zu haben… Eine gewisse Abhängigkeit von der “Wärme/Laufzeit” des Systems bilde ich mir ein trotzdem zu erkennen. Nach mehrstündigem Betrieb und einem darauf folgenden Neustart passiert nämlich manchmal das Wunder 4 -> 6 GB…
• Die Festmachung der Schläuche der Wasserkühlung mit Kabelbinder – Gewinde hätten mir hier besser gefallen.
• Inzwischen hat JZ ja leider auch den guten BIOS Support eingestellt. Aktuell ist das F12 von der GB Homepage drauf, Gottseidank gibt es hier noch die DVID Einstellung, so dass ich wenigstens Strom sparen kann
• Die Software des “ET6″ ist leider mal ziemlicher Müll… Taugt in kaum einer Weise für irgendwas

Nun stellt sich die Frage: Für wieviel das EX58-Extreme loswerden und was kommt rein? Der wassergekühlte Chipsatz gefällt mir ansich ja schon sehr gut… Anstehen würden hier gerade einige EVGA X58 Classifieds im Forum (E760er/E759er) mit teils vorinstalliertem EK Complete Kühler… Aber ob sich der Aufpreis lohnt?