Jens Schmalzing wrote:
Hi, Turbo Fredriksson writes:Anyone have an idea how to get 'official' support for the AmigaONE in Debian GNU/Linux?Implement it. If the kernel source needs patching, try to get the patch into the main kernel.org tree, or the Debian kernel-source package, or the Debian kernel-patch-powerpc package. If there is a kernel-image package already that should work (-powerpc, I presume?) but doesn't, find out how the .config itself, or the support scripts mkinitrd and mkvmlinuz need to be changed.
The firmware is U-Boot, so the kernel needs a bit of patching. Most of the guys working on the Linux kernel got tied up in writing stuff for AmigaOS4. It seems to me that unless one happens to be IBM or one of the other big players getting more than a few lines into any of the places you mention is quite an undertaking :-(
U-Boot comes with a tool that does more or less the same as mkvmlinuz, called mkimage (takes in an elf and an optional ramdisk image and outputs a bootable image)
Things I know that needs a patch:kernel-package (subarch in script plus new config-file. I've been using kernel-package on this subarch for almost a year, so this _shouldn't_ be difficult to implement ;-) )
kernel-patch-powerpc (unfortunately, we don't have anything later than 2.4.22 at the moment. Trying to follow the kernel development with a small team and no inside contacts feels like ice skating uphill)
debian-installer (at least we had to make our own version of bf, I presume d-i won't accept an unknown machine from /proc/cpuinfo either?)
amiga-fdisk (new extensions to RDB standard means running amiga-fdisk on the harddrive will disable dual-booting. I can provide the necessary bits. Quite small patch, actually)
mkuboot (or something along those lines, mkimage from U-Boot packaged so people can run it on their own machines instead of mkvmlinuz).
So the question basically boils down to this: Where is the right place to START?Btw, does anyone here know what excactly is responsible for setting correct timestamp on /proc? It comes up with a date some time in 1903 even though the clock is otherwise correct here, which causes havoc in certain places (for instance if machine was not shut down properly then /var/lock is never cleaned properly on bootup, and therefore xdm refuses to start). Debugging kernels is hard enough as it is without crap like that ;-)
-- AmigaOne dev list FAQ (when I say F, I mean F): http://www.samfundet.no/~olegil/amiga/