Posted on

wl12xx merged

commit 00d8979d598d5461a06d800c779f15e03888d9d8
Author: Kalle Valo 
Date:   Wed Apr 29 23:33:31 2009 +0300

    wl12xx: add driver

    wl12xx is a driver for TI wl1251 802.11 chipset designed for embedded
    devices, supporting both SDIO and SPI busses. Currently the driver
    supports only SPI. Adding support 1253 (the 5 GHz version) should be
    relatively easy. More information here:

    http://focus.ti.com/general/docs/wtbu/wtbuproductcontent.tsp?contentId=4711

    (Collapsed original sequence of pre-merge patches into single commit for
    initial merge. -- JWL)

    Signed-off-by: Kalle Valo 
    Signed-off-by: Bob Copeland 
    Signed-off-by: John W. Linville

Hooray, wl12xx is now in wireless-testing! As the commit log states, SDIO support isn’t there yet, because I haven’t written it yet. Well, I wrote some of it, but nothing worth even compile-testing yet.

As for the Android itself, I bought a snazzy serial breakout board for the phone so now I can do some real work on it. It works just fine with screen(1) as the terminal program.

Also, I solved the problem with booting: apparently the init program for 2.6.25 doesn’t work with 2.6.27 — when I put my own compiled init in the initramfs, everything mounted fine. The input devices now do not work, but I suspect it’s just a difference in paths and that an upgrade to 1.5 userland will fix all of that.

Posted on

Batman Eddy

Batman kiteI made my first kite in over a year this afternoon (yes, I am quite rusty). I plan to make a stack of these kites for my nephews with various super hero designs. This is the first and easiest one, which took about 4 hours of work today from start to finish. It isn’t perfect, the sides were a little uneven when I cut the sail which can be seen in the final product. Also I think appliqué really looks much better with the black outlines that I’ve used on my previous kites, but I really don’t have the time/patience to add another layer of ripstop to these just for that effect.

Still, these will be much better kites than you can find in your local store. At least I hope so; I haven’t made this type before — who knows if they will fly. However, I should find out soon since this one just needs a bridle and sticks and it’s good to go.

Posted on

Closer

I was in fact wrong that my self-compiled android kernels weren’t booting — they were. But they do fail somewhere in init:. Unfortunately, when you boot the phone, you don’t have any idea why it fails because there’s no console by default. It would’ve been a lot easier to see this if I had a serial cable, but I did finally remember that I could use fbcon with the smallest font and CONFIG_PRINTK_DELAY to see the messages scroll by. And so now I see the problem:

A N D R O I D
init: Unable to open persistent property directory /data/property errno: 2
init: cannot find '/system/bin/sh', disabling 'console'
init: cannot find '/system/bin/servicemanager', disabling 'servicemanager'
...

Obviously, the init script can’t mount the mtd partitions, despite the partition tables being successfully probed at start and my having yaffs2 built-in. Oh well, at least now I have a direction to start debugging.

The 2.6.25 branch of the msm tree, incidentally, works fine with the stock initrd and userland, but who wants such an old kernel? Oh, and I changed my bootup logo to a shiny Tux instead of the default robot. “Android isn’t Linux” indeed.

Posted on

Manual git-svn clone

I finally decided to do something about the five independent git trees I had on my hard drive at work. The problem is they are all really branches of the same subversion repository, and moving patches back and forth between them meant I had added them all as git remotes to each other. The meta problem is that we didn’t always branch off of the same trunk directory, from back when we were drinking the “just snapshots of directories” subversion kool-aid, so git svn clone doesn’t do the right thing for our branches.

The ideal setup is one where I have a git branch for each subversion branch all in one tree, and git svn dcommit will go to the right place. As it turns out, this isn’t too hard to achieve, but requires a lot of waiting around when building the repository. You just manually add different svn-remote sections to your .git/config, then run git svn fetch for each one:

$ cat .git/config
[...]
[svn-remote "svn"]
url = svn+ssh://server/svn/trunk/
fetch = :refs/remotes/git-svn
[svn-remote "svn-bar"]
url = svn+ssh://server/svn/branches/foo/bar
fetch = :refs/remotes/git-svn-bar
[...]
$ git svn fetch
$ git svn fetch svn-bar
$ git checkout -b bar svn-bar

Now ‘bar’ is a branch tracking the directory in branches/foo/bar, master is your normal trunk line of development, and git svn dcommit just works. Having 8 years of history in a 400 meg local tree is pretty nice.

Posted on

Emulator

The Android source code includes at least two ARM sub-architectures in their kernel tree. The one actually used on the G1 hardware is derived from the Qualcomm MSM machine type, at least part of which is in the mainline. Then there is “goldfish,” which appears to be just a pseudo machine used only for the emulator. While I haven’t had a lot of success with the MSM stuff booting on the phone so far, building the emulator kernel is not too hard once you know where to look:

# get the MSM specific tree.
# You don't really need it but might as
# well grab both up front into the same git repo.
$ git clone git://android.git.kernel.org/kernel/msm.git msm
$ cd msm

# also grab the common one for emulator target and check it out
$ git remote add common git://android.git.kernel.org/kernel/common.git
$ git fetch common
$ git checkout -b goldfish common/android-goldfish-2.6.27

$ cat <<_EOM >make-arm.sh
#! /bin/bash

# I use the codesourcery toolchain
XGCC=/opt/xgcc
PATH="$XGCC/arm-2008q3/bin/:$PATH" make ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-none-eabi- "$@"
_EOM

$ chmod 755 make-arm.sh
$ ./make-arm.sh goldfish_defconfig
$ ./make-arm.sh

Now the emulator can be run with something like:

$ export ANDROID_PRODUCT_OUT=`/bin/pwd`/out/target/product/dream
$ emulator -verbose -show-kernel -kernel msm/arch/arm/boot/zImage