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]

Ok, I hope the person who made this kernel is reading this thread. Regarding the new gui - EWW! It displays in a huge splash "Angstrom" while hiding the kernel messages. I thought this was a kexec boot kernel, not an angstrom one. I don't even have Angstrom on my zaurus and as far as I can tell Angstrom has never been stable on the zaurus anyway.

Second issue, it still takes F.O.R.E.V.E.R to scan the internal flash. Please disable it or fix it.

Third issue, this new gui, once it has finally scanned and found the bootable kernels, does not show the name (label) of the selection like the old one did. Before I had a list that showed "Debian Eabi" and "Sharp JP rom". Now it just tells me on which partition it found the kernel. If I didn't already know which partition booted which OS from the previous kernel I would be guessing here. Not good for any new users of this kernel.

I'm going back to the previous, better kernel. Thanks for the continued work though, but I would like it to improve things instead of degrading.

[ant]

Ok, I hope the person who made this kernel is reading this thread. Regarding the new gui - EWW! It displays in a huge splash "Angstrom" while hiding the kernel messages. I thought this was a kexec boot kernel, not an angstrom one. I don't even have Angstrom on my zaurus and as far as I can tell Angstrom has never been stable on the zaurus anyway.

Second issue, it still takes F.O.R.E.V.E.R to scan the internal flash. Please disable it or fix it.

Third issue, this new gui, once it has finally scanned and found the bootable kernels, does not show the name (label) of the selection like the old one did. Before I had a list that showed "Debian Eabi" and "Sharp JP rom". Now it just tells me on which partition it found the kernel. If I didn't already know which partition booted which OS from the previous kernel I would be guessing here. Not good for any new users of this kernel.

I'm going back to the previous, better kernel. Thanks for the continued work though, but I would like it to improve things instead of degrading.

Purposedly, we try to hide everything to the user.
There is a kernel bootlogo and printk loglevel is set to 3.
Which information do you need from kexecboot micro-kernel? ATM it has wrong idea about resized mtdparts, those are re-read by the kexecboot binary in the initramfs.
FWIW we are working to add some logging but just the debug output you would see on serial once compiled with --enable-debug, no kernel output.

About label, check your /boot/boot.cfg.

Finally, about the logo, it all depends on the distro you're compiling but is purely cosmetic thing. Most distros are using standard OpenEmbedded logo (the OE one) but Angstrom has own.
Ideally we would use the original white/red SHARP logo but it seems there could be some copyright issue.

Regards

Ant