Zaurus Kexecboot-enabled Kernels, Graphical bootmenu for Zaurus Options

[ant]

Hi,

the hackers at OpenEmbedded are almost ready to ship a new set of special kexec-enabled 2.6 kernels for all Zaurus machine supported:

c7x0 (SL-C7x0 - SL-C860)
akita (SL-C1000)
spitz (SL-C3xx)
tosa (SL-6xxx)
collie (SL5500)
poodle (SL5600)

These special-purpose kernels are small enough to be flashed on NAND and feature a frambefuffer graphical menu for the selection of the boot media.
Multipartitioned cards and lot of filesystems supported.
Kernel and cmdline reside now in /boot.

THIS IS THE LONG AWAITED SOLUTION FOR BOOTING DIFFERENT DISTROS FROM SD/CF

Release is scheduled for end of December. Stay tuned!

Ant

[xamindar]

GAH! Forget it. I copied the image.nfo file over to a boot.cfg file and now it doesn't even show my sharp rom listed anymore. Then I tried booting into the debian eabi install and the kernel hung at "failed to load initial console" or whatever.

You guys have absolutely no documentation so how can you expect anyone else to use this kernel without having to scour through your source code to find out what and how it needs the boot.cfg file set up? I'll take another look at this kernel if someone ever decides to document their work so others can use it. Until then, I'll stick with the Omegamoon kernel which works perfectly (despite scanning the nand very slowly as well) and even has a better looking menu (with this angstrom one you can't tell which is the selection, the darker one or the lighter one).

[koan]

Hi Xamindar,

I think you should take a break and chill out for a bit. You can't expect things to work seamlessly when they are not really aimed at Joe User. As soon as you reflash you are on the road to being a hacker...

Why don't you get on the mailing list and relate your experiences there ? I am sure they would appreciate feedback directly from a tester. (I don't know who user ant is IRL). http://lists.linuxtogo.org/pipermail/zaurus-devel/

Documentation is always the last thing to get written. If you read the mailing list archives it looks like they just want feedback to see what works and what doesn't at this stage. Plenty of things seems to be not working.

I think that what is on your flash is up to you, you don't need Sharp to supply new data. I expect though that your Sharp ROM is configured to be on flash so removing it is not an option. I am guessing that for some reason scanning jffs is slow; my understanding is that kexec is searching for bootable kernels. It would be nice if there was an option in one of the config files to disable scanning of flash.

[xamindar]

Hi Xamindar,

I think you should take a break and chill out for a bit. You can't expect things to work seamlessly when they are not really aimed at Joe User. As soon as you reflash you are on the road to being a hacker...

Oh I'm chill. I just put my zaurus back to what it used to be and everything is fine. I'm sorry I sound harsh. It is frustrating to have people post updates like this but leave out important information that is required to get it working.

Why don't you get on the mailing list and relate your experiences there ? I am sure they would appreciate feedback directly from a tester. (I don't know who user ant is IRL). http://lists.linuxtogo.org/pipermail/zaurus-devel/

I'm not sure they would. They seem to be expecting me to be running Angstrom. I have never been able to get it working, have you?

Documentation is always the last thing to get written. If you read the mailing list archives it looks like they just want feedback to see what works and what doesn't at this stage. Plenty of things seems to be not working.

We are talking at least a couple of notes or examples of what files it is looking for to boot. That is hardly time consuming documentation. Thanks for the mail archive tip, I'll scan through it some time for any information.

I think that what is on your flash is up to you, you don't need Sharp to supply new data. I expect though that your Sharp ROM is configured to be on flash so removing it is not an option. I am guessing that for some reason scanning jffs is slow; my understanding is that kexec is searching for bootable kernels. It would be nice if there was an option in one of the config files to disable scanning of flash.

Yeah, I just realized this topic is under the "Angstrom & Openzaurus" sub-category on the forums. Maybe he assumed I was running Angstrom. I honestly would be willing to give Angstrom another try but last time I did I had a hard time finding a way to install it onto an SD card and boot into it. But anyway, yes, it would be a very nice option to be able to disable the internal flash scan. I can't think of any reason someone would have a kernel on the internal flash for it to scan.