Hi people

I'm trying to wire up a loon with debian/emdebian armel rootfs and USB
host working so I can test modern gpsd with a PPS timing signlal from
a GPS.

This is proving surprisingly difficult. 

I have an old CUED-vintage FPGA baloon and a single-sided
barric-vintage CPLD loon. The CUED one work but is running arm, not
armel (and is unhelpfully high-power). ARM doesn't have gpsd v2.95,
only armel. We could upgrade, but does anyone know if the current 1.0
release works OK on these boards?

So, I try the CPLD board. That works fine and boots into installer
kernel. It has no rootfs or kernel in flash.

I try building current trunk and am mildly astonished to find that
selecting 'gneric balloon' and waiting about 4 hours it all built -
without any whinging. Well done!

However copying the rootfs (emdebia+modules)  and kernel onto root and
boot (/dev/mtdblock1 and mtdblock0 respectively). All it does now is
give me 'UNDEF' and die on trying to boot the kernel. Anyone recall
what that's about?

If I stop the bootloader and mount root and boot manually they seem OK. 

bootloader is Rev 3-3-0 for Balloon [LARGE_MEMORY_MODEL] [BIG_KERNEL]
[MD5] [NAND] [YAFFS] [MONO]
Last link date: Thu May 20 13:17:31 BST 2010

installer kernel that works is: 
Linux  2.6.29.1-pxa270 #10 Thu May 20 02:57:47 BST 2010 armv5tel unknown

balloon build built kernel 2.6.37.6 by default. 

I also discovered that you can't use USB host on older loon with the
breakout boards - you have to use a CUED board. Wired up wrong
port/pins I guess.

I have a newer loon, but without a J12 soldered on the back I don't
think I can access USB host - right?

This is all teriffically urgent as I am leaving on a plane tomorrow,
and want to leave GPS-research man with a working board.

What's the easiest way to do that? 

this is what you get if you let the balloon boot the normal kernel:
MMU table entries
00000000 A3E00C0A
00000040 04000C02
00000080 08000C02
00000100 10000C02
00000140 14000C02
00000000 A3E00C0A
00000500 00000C02
00000A00 A0000C0A
00000A40 A4000C0A
00000E00 E0000C02
Enabling MMU... OK
UNDF
F1DA87EC
CB777BF1

or, stopping at the boot prompt to enable debug:
Enabling MMU... OK
boot> boot
booting yaffs...
Rootfs is "yaffs2"
Kernel filesize = 0x001E00A0
Booting file "/boot/zImage"...
kernel partition base A0008000
kernel_magic=00000000
kernel_region_words[9]=00000000
copying NetBSD kernel ... done
done!
Jumping to 0xF0000020..
UNDF
F1DA87EC
CBFF7BF1

I've seen this before. Do I just need a newer bootloader (risk of
total breakage if that doesn't work...

Am I better off working with release 1.0 or current trunk in terms of
'known to work' especially on v3.old hardware?

If I go to new hardware how do I get USB host wired up?

Cheers

Wookey
-- 
Principal hats:  Linaro, Emdebian, Wookware, Balloonboard, ARM
http://wookware.org/