Fwd: A Question from a newbie in Gumstix

[Charalampos Gkikas]

Hi Everyone,

Hello Everybody! I have recently bought a gumstix connex 400xm and a netCF expansion board. Due to my mistake I didn't realize that it had buildroot, and to what I want to do with this, I think OpenEmbeded will help far more.

First I saw that U-boot is not created in openembeded, so I have to pick a pre-built one from here: http://gumstix.net/feeds/u-boot/ which has two options for connex u-boot:

• http://gumstix.net/feeds/u-boot/u-boot-connex-400-r1578.bin
• http://gumstix.net/feeds/u-boot/u-boot-connex-400-r1604.bin
  

which have a very small change in the size (around 8 bytes).

Another problem is that I have to flash the root filesystem over ethernet (using ssh). I don't have a serial way to connect. I have found on the net information for that: http://docwiki.gumstix.org/Replacing_the_filesystem_image (buildroot)

But in this documentation it has this warning:
"You need to pad the rootfs.arm_nofpu.jffs2 to the appropriate size or your filesystem will become corrupt after reboot."
and also this:
"U-Boot (mtd0) - 256K : 262144 Bytes.
Kernel (mtd2) - 1M   : 1048576 Bytes.
Padding size is FlashTotal - Kernel - U-Boot."

So the questions are these:

• How I can manage the padding in the openembedded images, when the U-Boot is prebuilt?
• Which of the 2 revisions of u-boot should I choose?

Thank you in advance,
Χάρης

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[Chris Dollar]

Hi Charalampos,

2008/5/22 Charalampos Gkikas <hargikas@...>:

So the questions are these:

• How I can manage the padding in the openembedded images, when the U-Boot is prebuilt?
• Which of the 2 revisions of u-boot should I choose?

As for the u-boot question, chances are your connex already has u-boot 1.2.0 on it, so there is really no reason to upgrade it.  You can check it by running 'cat /proc/mtd' on your gumstix -- if you see 3 partitions listed (mtd0, mtd1, and mtd2) then you shouldn't need to reflash u-boot.  If you only have 2 partitions then you'll need to update u-boot, but that cannot be done via ssh (well... you can replace u-boot via ssh, but not upgrade it).

If you follow the instructions at http://www.gumstix.net/Software/view/Developer-how-to-s/Reflashing-from-a-linux-login-session/111.html you won't need to pad your filesystem image since you'll be using flash_eraseall, which makes it so you don't need a padded image.

Chris

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