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

[Brendan Berney]

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)