20060912

Cross tools and arm hacking

In the past few days I've been hacking on arm related stuff. I've worked on build tool issues (mostly integrating cogent's changes to support arm). In addition, I've had time to improve hardware support a little.

I've been getting some excellent feedback on the arm build changes, and many of them have been integrated into the tree. More to follow soon after I catch up to the changes that have already been committed which were (slightly) different than the ones I proposed. We may yet get binutils and friends merged into 6.2. The arm vs armel vs armeb issues, however, remain open.

After spending a lot of time on the build tools, it was refreshing to return to the hardware side of things. The iic bus is hanging on write transaction. I don't know if this is an interaction with the boot blocks (they too hang in the same place in some cases), or if it is a problem in the kernel code. Careful study is needed. Alas, pressures elsewhere mean that careful study must be deferred for a bit.

My main thrust has been in MMC/SD integration. I've mostly finished boot2 for at91. boot2 likely is a lame name, since it isn't the second stage boot loader, but rather the primary boot loader for this machine (redboot and uboot were rejected early on as being too large). However, despite the name (which it gets from where I stole it from), I have it loading kernels off ufs1 partitions on SD cards. I hope to get MMC card support added as well.

In addition to booting, I've been hacking on the qdmmc driver. I've added sd support, for the most part, and have refactored it to boot. Once we have this working, I'll get going on the more generic SD/MMC layer that supports things like SDIO cards.

I have a good collection of SD cards (16MB, 256MB, 512MB and 4GB), but only one MMC card (256MB). If you have MMC cards that you aren't presently using and would like to donate to my collection, please contact me at my FreeBSD email address.

No comments: