A number of things have happened recently that have not yet made it to the
list, so here is an update so people know where we are at.

YAFFS2 support. Quite some time ago Nick Bane got 2K nand working on
balloon2, with support in the bootloader and 2.4.25 kernel, and got YAFFS2
up and running. However whilst it superficially worked pretty weel, it had
the serious problem that any attempt to delete a block caused an error and
that block to be marked bad. He left it for fixes in YAFFS2 to come down the
line and sort things out.

A year(?) later a number of YAFFS2 bugs have been fixed, but the bad-block
problem remained. Colin updated the kernel to latest YAFFS2, and Wookey
finally got round to tracking down the problem and fixing bootldr and the
kernel to use the MTD AUTOPLACE placement of bad block markers, and to do
ECC properly. (It's amazing how well YAFFS2 can work even when things are
seriously broken).

So there is now a bootldr and kernel version that work on 2K nand (but are
probably now broken on 512bytes nand, so some more work is needed to have a
unified-working codebase). This proves that 2K nand can be used on balloon
in the future, which is important for balloon3 production.

Slightly ropey tarballs at http://balloonboard.org/files/


Balloon3:

Nick Bane reports:
Balloon3 now has an offical arm-linux ID.

Linux has booted as far as a root filesystem, proving that the balloon
hardware 'basically works' with the new large-memory model.
So there is now a pxa version of bootldr, a 2.6.16.5 zImage and a balloon3
yaffs root image.

Avalable in /balloon/releases/development/balloon3
and /balloon/releases/v0.7/roots on husaberg.

All highly pre-pre-alpha, but a milestone nevertheless. Well done Nick and
Chris.

They also noted that current consumption was 75ma when idle and 7ma in
suspend at 4.2v, which is pretty good for a non-optimised first cut.


FPGA:

Dave Bisset has succeeded in modifying jflash to program the FPGA version of
balloon3, so the exciting propect of cool FPGA-stuff gets a big step nearer.


Tools update:

Colin Tuckley has been sorting out the tools so we now have an SVN
repository for definitive versions of things, a nicer download tool than
fillballoon (bbl) and a verion of bootldr that builds on gcc3.3 instead of
needing 2.95.

And Lennert BuytenHek is fixing the outstanding 'DMA doesn't work on kernel
2.6 with balloon2' which is preventing us abaondonning kernel 2.4 for both
ballon2 and 3.

I think that's all, fill in anything I forgot.

Wookey
-- 
Aleph One Ltd, Bottisham, CAMBRIDGE, CB5 9BA, UK  Tel +44 (0) 1223 811679
work: http://www.aleph1.co.uk/     play: http://www.chaos.org.uk/~wookey/