Re: Porting Kernel / Drivers to BeagleBoard

Hi Jim,

Jim Burnes wrote:
> That's what I thought too, but not being totally familiar with BeOS in 
> console-only mode I wasn't sure how far I could take it.
By time you can see commandline apps running, full kernel up and 
running, and you can e.g. ssh into the box using the network interface, 
I think you can safely say that it is time to work on the GUI stuff ;)
>  > What other issues would you look at?  Probably some sort of custom
> > boot loader?
>
>     You could look into actually using u-boot for this. I presume (haven't
>     checked) that there's a u-boot version available for this board, and
>     this could be used to actually bootstrap the Haiku kernel by writing a
>     small u-boot app.
>
>
> u-boot is already in ROM/FLASH out-of-the-box.   I'll study the u-boot 
> architecture.  I imagine it has some critical information about 
> initial device layout and discovery.
Cool. You could initially write the Haiku (kernel) loader as a simple 
u-boot app, or even directly load and execute the kernel itself using 
u-boot. This makes development a dream, as you can simply use tftp to 
load the kernel from your development pc into memory on the target. 
That's how most of the linux embedded development work is often done, 
anyway.
> According to Axel, you're trying to keep platform specific 
> dependencies in /src/system/boot/platform and CPU architecture 
> differences in .../system/kernel/arch.
>
> From most-specific to least-specific I think the organization goes 
> something like: OS->platform->CPU->variant
>
> Which leads to:
>
> beos->pc->x86->64
> linux->amiga->68k->32
> amigados->amiga->powerpc->32
> windowsXP->pc->x86->32
>
> and finally
>
> haiku->beagle->ARM->v8
>
> Where the platform is a combination of bus definition, minimal devices 
> and perhaps boot process.
>
> That's just a guess though.  Maybe it's too arbitrary.
>
> I'll do some more studying and see if I can't come up with an 
> architecture definition for the beagle that directly addresses Haiku 
> requirements.
Take a good look at how Linux/BSD does it, since they already have to 
support a lot of different ARM based architectures.... Borrow their 
experience, so to speak. We might even be able to improve on it ;)

If I can find some time to spend on this, I might look at it too, though 
at the moment my time is pretty scattered, but enough to at least give 
you feedback on the ideas.... So if you keep working on this, please 
keep posting ;)

Ithamar.


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