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.

Hacked systems include NCSA-TeraGrid and SDSC. NCSA-TeraGrid is the 35th fastest cluster in the world.

• 10 April 14h00 - IART221 Animation - Complete rendering of 2 scenes for final animation movie (20 seconds of video output)
• 10 April 15h00 - ITEC339 DB - Team meeting
• 10 April 23h00 - INTD307 Communities - initial implementation
• 11 April 23h15 - INTD307 Communities - final implementation
• 13 April 09h30–13h30 - INTD307 Communities - Presentation
• 13 April 16h00–17h20 — IART221 Animation - final presentation (all video and sound editing needs to be done for this)
• 14 April 10h00–11h20 - ITEC330 OS - Exam
• 15 April 14h30–17h20 - ITEC339 DB - Final demo
• 16 April 10h00–12h50 - ITEC333 Networking - Final exam

Craploads of animation to do (i'm about 50% on one scene so far...), and then build a complete webapp for INTD307 (to present on Tuesday morning), and fix up the main webapp for the DB presentation.

I'm sooooo dead. Why can't TechWeek be over already?

1. Grab the book nearest to you, turn to page 18, find line 4. Write down what it says: "Odds of winning the top prize in a U.S. state lottery and being killed by lightning in the same day - 1 in 2^55"
2. Stretch your left arm out as far as you can. What do you touch? Nothing there
3. What is the last thing you watched on TV?: Weather channel
4. WITHOUT LOOKING, guess what the time is: 12:20am
5. Now look at the clock, what is the actual time?: 12:32am
6. With the exception of the computer, what can you hear?: lots of computers whirring, my winamp.
7. When did you last step outside? what were you doing?: Between 6pm and 7.20pm, coming home from University.
8. What are you wearing?: PJ pants, t-shirt, fleece overshirt, socks, briefs, slippers
9. Did you dream last night? i don't recall any dreams from last night (I seldom do)
10. When did you last laugh? earlier today
11. What is on the walls of the room you are in?: framed Neon Genesis Evangelion poster (Genesis 0:5), nothing else.
12. Seen anything weird lately?: Store name, "Hung & Sons"
13. What do you think of this quiz?: Random
14. What is the last film you saw?: Last Samurai
15. If you became a multi-millionaire overnight, what would you buy first?: I'd invest first.
16. Tell me something about you that I don't know: You don't know me.
17. If you could change one thing about the world, regardless of guilt or politics, what would you do?: Ability to stop time!
18. Do you like to dance?: not really
19. George Bush: Go back to Texas and put your head in the sand.
20. Imagine your first child is a girl, what do you call her?: Simone (I really don't know yet, so that's a random guess)
21. Imagine your first child is a boy, what do you call him?: Arthur
22. Would you ever consider living abroad? Yeah
23. Will you pass on this survey?: It's a meme and nobodies grading this, so passing is irrelavant.