OMAP3, the kernel, and me


WizardStan

Mega GP Mania
Joined
May 24, 2008
Messages
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I'm looking for someone with kernel experience on the OMAP3, ie, the SoC in the Pandora and BeagleBoard. Rambling details of kernel hacking ahead. You've been warned.

After many, many, many years I figured it'd be a good time to try and update my original BeagleBoard. Unfortunately I had installed Angstrom Next which appears to be entirely dead, so I experimented with Debian, Ubuntu, and Arch. Long story short, I can't get any kernel image to boot properly: the newer kernels that are supplied with these distros fail to work at all (even after updating u-boot), so I tried building my own from mainline. I managed to get 3.2.28 to boot but it can't load my wifi module at all for some reason; nothing else I tried got even this far.
So I took the 3.0.17 from my old Angstrom build and tried it on each and they boot, load the module just fine, but it can't load the firmware in order to run it, so still no network. This doesn't make sense to me, it's the exact same kernel, module, and firmware that worked on my ancient Angstrom install; the firmware file is there, it just refuses to load it, says it can't be found. That's a stumper.
I'm now doing an experiment whereby I made a backup of my Angstrom image and am now upgrading all packages from next to core and hoping for the best. Not that core is in a much better of a position but at least if I need a package I can install it without too much trouble.
Ideally what I'd like to do is build a newer kernel and run debian but I can't do that, I don't know what I'm doing wrong.
Has anyone had any experience building the kernel for the Pandora, AND has time to help walk me through what I'm doing wrong? I don't want to take up anyone's time; even assuming this hybrid upgrade thing I'm trying doesn't work, I've got the backup and my system was working, it was just old and didn't have the ability to install anything new, but I can survive, so not a big deal. The important thing to remember is that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time...
 
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Which Beagleboard Do you have exactly?
I have the Old Beagleboard RevC3 and with the Help from Raik we got the Pandora Zaxxon working without 3D Things and Sound on it.
Are you interrested?
 
Yeah, it's the C3. My attempt to cross upgrade from next to core failed utterly. Sometime in the middle of the night, while it was downloading updates, my internet went out, so it only did partial updates, and several things "updated" but then failed because it couldn't create symlinks. I'm not sure what exactly was THE broken thing that did it but I can no longer log in and I'm just tired of it. I'm tired of Angstrom, I do this every few years and it's always a fight to get it working. I don't expect things to be updated forever but is it too much to ask that when they drop support that they don't delete everything? Like just say "this is the final build, it'll never be updated but at the same time if you ever need a fresh install it's right here, along with all the steps to get it to work", is that too much to ask?
I don't want Zaxxon, I don't want Angstrom at all. The packages keep changing, their broken, the whole system is a disgrace. One of the problems I had in upgrading was that the package list was different from what was available, for several packages. The package list would say "1.2.3" but the actual file would be "1.2.2". I'm tired and I'm cranky and I just want it to be easy again, to work like it was when I first got it. If I could just get a working kernel there's half a dozen different roots I can try out.

hns, thanks for the tips. I'm trying to clone git repositories but they just... aren't. It says "cloning int 'gta04-kernel'..." and then nothing, for many many minutes. I've done this four times now. It's not even timing out, just sitting there. I'mma gonna assume network issues and try again tomorrow, but this all looks promising.
 
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