From NAS-Central Buffalo - The Linkstation Wiki

Revision as of 15:55, 26 August 2006

Project 2.6 mips

This Page should be used to collect all the wisdom regarding compiling a working 2.6-kernel for the LS 2(mips).

Everyone is invited to edit this page and add information!

All compiling information and information about patches should get here. if needed i can modify mediawiki to allow some more filetypes to be allowed to upload to the wiki. this way we could even share our patches directly here on this page.

Compiling a 2.4 Kernel

Roadmap

1) Build a 2.4.20-kernel from the gpl-source

(there you won`t need to apply the melfs.patch as this is obviously included)

we will test it by trying to load the resulting vmlinux.bin with the mips-loader.o

2) Create a patch for compiling a working LS2 Kernel from the vanilla kernel 2.4.20

After we know that we can build the kernel from GPL Source we need to find out what the differences are between the vanilla kernel and the GPL-Source Kernel. I tried to create a diff between those kernel-sources already (but i noticed that there are far too much lines in it as some lines have a "-" before and later a "+" for adding the unmodified again...maybe this is related to some additional blank lines or comments?

Here is a diff of the arch-tree between the vanilla 2.4.20 kernel and linux-2.4.20_mipsel_linkstation

 http://www.unet.univie.ac.at/~a0025690/arch_mips_diff.txt

and here is a complete kernel-diff

 http://www.unet.univie.ac.at/~a0025690/kernel_diff.txt

3) Build the latest 2.4-Kernel available

We should have a patch to create a LS2-kernel from the vanilla 2.4.20 kernel. Now we can try to create the latest 2.4-kernel available. currently this is 2.4.33.2 (released on the 22.8.2006)

 http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/linux-2.4.33.2.tar.gz 

Notes

do not forget to apply the melfs.patch because of the custom ext2_magic_number buffalo invented to protect the linux filesystem from us.here is the melfs patch which takes care of that

 http://www.unet.univie.ac.at/~a0025690/development/melfs.patch

Compiling a 2.6 Kernel

Currently there is no patch for that. As a starting point we want to find out whats the differences between the vanilla kernel 2.4.20 and the GPL-one. after creating a patch for that we want to create the latest 2.4 Kernel. after this has been accomplished we want to look at porting the 2.6-kernel to the LS2.

Notes

We definitely will have to port the arch-specific-stuff of the 2.6-kernel for the LS2. We do not have a Patch like the kurobox-patch which was created by javascout for the kurobox(ppc). We were able to use it as a starting point for the LS1/HG. This means we will have to start from scratch. Everything depends on how good the mips port of kernel 2.6 is.

Information about loader.o for the LS2

This should be possible....because Ejii coded the assembler stuff needed by loader.o because of the different CPU (mips instead of ppc) for this and he already compiled a kernel for that:

http://www5.atwiki.jp/kuro-bsd/pages/132.html

Here is the page with google online translation for surfing on the page:

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww5.atwiki.jp%2Fkuro-bsd%2Fpages%2F132.html&langpair=ja%7Cen&hl=en&ie=UTF8

Links & Resources

• http://www.kernel.org
• http://www.unet.univie.ac.at/~a0025690/development/development.html
• http://www5.atwiki.jp/kuro-bsd/pages/132.html