Move along, nothing to read

Note: Blogs are useful for many things, including keeping track of technical work. This geek-talk will baffle and confuse many people.

Ok, so I had a discussion with somebody at mycable.de about their XXS1500 device, and managed to buy a used one very cheaply for the express purpose of porting Gentoo Linux to it.

Although I recieved it more than a week ago, since I was on vacation last week, I didn't exactly do anything &em; the vacation was AWAY from technology.

Once I got around a problem of a powerbar (wallwarts take too much space!), I was good to start trying it out.

It shipped with 2.4.21 and a uclibc environment with busybox providing most functionality. It only has an extremely minimal thttpd, and no native way of getting data onto the machine (I'm ignoring the serial console here).

After a bit of hacking around, I set up a crosscompiler chain using Gentoo's crossdev:
crossdev -u -k --vgcc=3.3.4-r1 --arch=mipsel

Built up a kernel from the Linux-MIPS CVS sources, using the xxs1500_defconfig in the tree. A number of things failed to build, as it seems the XXS1500 stuff has suffered some bitrot. Mostly trivial things like #include locations changing, and a few defines changing. However there are several major breakages I couldn't fix myself:
PCMCIA fails to compile &en; looks like it needs an update to the latest 2.6 pcmcia system, a sample on how to do it is available.
Audio (OSS) fails to compile &en; I have no idea about it.

Turning those off, and fixing the other minor things, I got a kernel, that didn't want to boot. Dug some, found this is the first time I needed an SREC kernel :-). gmake vmlinux.srec to the rescue. I hadn't used YAMON before.

Stuck the kernel into my tftp system, tried to boot with an nfsroot. kernel panic somewhere in networking :-(. Turned off networking &em; need to fix it later as well. Grabbed a mipsel initrd image from `Kumba's work (thanks for the pointer to it Hardave) [http://dev.gentoo.org/~kumba/mips/cobalt/netboot/]. Kernel boots up and gives me an initial environment now, but no networking as noted.

Issues to work on: (mainly my own todo list)

• Kernel fixin': Network, PCMCIA, Audio [in that order]
• NFSRoot environment
• Device speed: this is supposed to be a 500mhz CPU, but it only says 396Mhz, and there is an undocumented YAMON command 'ss' I don't quite get yet.
• produce kernel patch to send back upstream
• uclibc
• catalyst target

I'm going to keep a collection of downloads for this work on my Gentoo dev-space here:
http://dev.gentoo.org/~robbat2/xxs1500/

The first installment today has my serial console log and my initial working netboot kernel+initrd.