Subject: [E3-hacking] Opie on the E3 woes...

From: Brendan Berney <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2006 20:18:16 +0100

Hi everyone,
	Firstly, let me just say that I'm V. impressed with the work everyone
on this group is putting into this. When I first saw one of these things
in Tesco for next to nothing I though - cool, now I can do a yell.co.uk
lookup without having to wait for a laptop to boot etc.
	Anyway, with a view to this I plodded off to OpenEmbedded and started
playing. At first I manually patched the OE snapshot using David Ford's
patches and managed to build the uImage, bootstrap image and a
(massively cut down) Opie image. My first problem at that stage was, and
still is, how to get the E3 to 'see' the rootfs. Here is what I did:

First I got hold of an old 128MB usb flash card and formatted it as an
ext2 fs. 

Next I 'untared' the rootfs.tar.bz2 file that bitbake and OE had
generated onto this with the result that I had a perfectly readable root
fs on the USB stick. 

I then created an 'opie' pbl file thus:

write 0x11900000 uImage-amsdelta-20060606090139.bin
write 0x11f00000 u-boot-amsdelta-1.1.4-r0.bin
exec 0x11f00000

which successfully loads the bootstrap and kernel images into the e3. 

At the u-boot command line, I issued the following:

setenv bootargs mem=32M root=/dev/sda0 rootfstype=ext2

and then... on the bootm command everything appears to work...at first.

Ultimately I get stuck with:

VFS: No root yet, retrying to mount root on sda0 (unknown block(0,0))
Kernel panic: Unable to mount root fs on etc.etc.

Please let me know what I am missing, no doubt I have done something
stupid. I seem to remember that maybe I need to pivot the bootup using a
ramdisk but don't know how to do this...

My second problem is that, having noticed that recent OE snapshots no
incorporate the work to date, I set off to try with one of those and
rashly deleted my working snapshot... Anyway whilst I can get (with much
fiddling) a UImage and bootstrap image built, I cannot get an Opie image
anymore :-(. There seem to be many clashes between certain parts (such
as bluetooth support) and the newer kernel. Does anyone have a recent OE
snapshot that works and is prepared to put it up here?

Cheers all,
Wiretrip (Brendan Berney)

---

From: David Ford <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2006 20:33:31 +0100

> Hi everyone,
Hi Brendan,

> still is, how to get the E3 to 'see' the rootfs. Here is what I did:
Right, yes, I have never managed to get the system to boot directly off
a USB memory stick unfortunately, but you may have more luck than I did!

If you can't get it working, there are two ways I've got around this,
the simple one is to create a bootstrap image that you initially load as
a ramdisk, and
to mount your USB memory stick and chroot to it. The more complicated
method is to put Opie on the built in NAND
flash and boot from it that way. I have had both working, and should
probably update my patches and improve the
documentation for doing both with the patches! unfortunately I am
currently in the middle of both writing a
dissertation and moving this week, so it'll probably be a couple of
weeks before I'm in a position to do much more E3 stuff.

> setenv bootargs mem=32M root=/dev/sda0 rootfstype=ext2

wouldn't the root be /dev/sda1, not sda0?

> snapshot that works and is prepared to put it up here?
I've not had chance to update my patches for a few months, once things
calm down here, I intend to do so
and to try and get some of the patches submitted upstream.

David

---

From: "Piotr Michniewski" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2006 00:53:10 +0200

Well, I managed to do that putting the major and minor device numbers
on the command line. I don't remember exactly, but I think it was
root=block(8,1) or something like that.

-- 
Piotr Michniewski

---

From: Sean Furey <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2006 00:08:33 +0100

(sorry if I've broken threading, I wasn't subscribed when the quoted
message was sent)

David Ford wrote:
> Right, yes, I have never managed to get the system to boot directly
> off a USB memory stick unfortunately, but you may have more luck than
> I did!

For what it's worth, I have a WGT634U booting with root on a USB stick
using the following kernel command line:

console=ttyS0,115200 root=/dev/sda1 rootdelay=10

I haven't tried booting the E3 from a USB stick, so I don't know if your
problems were the same as those the WGT has, but the rootdelay=10 gives
the kernel a bit of time to recognise the stick before it attempts to
mount it.

Sean