[Balloon] 2.6.18 status

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Author: Jonathan McDowell
Date:  
To: balloon
Subject: [Balloon] 2.6.18 status
Hello.

Today I finally got USB host up and running with 2.6.18 on my Balloon2
(I know Balloon3 is where it's at, but spare a thought for us with only
the older hardware ;).

As such it's possible the current state of my 2.6.18 port might be
useful to people now. Or at least somewhat more interesting to them. I
have put my patches (against vanilla 2.6.18), a zImage, a modules.tar.gz
and the .config file used at:

http://balloonboard.org/~noodles/2.6.18-r1/

The status is as follows:

* Base balloon2 support. Needs some more cleaning up.
* SAMOSA support, though this needs further work - I haven't done any of
the turning it into a proper bus that Nick was talking about.
* NAND on the SAMOSA bus.
* CF support - I've had this working with a CF network card.
* ID chip support, though not in the way you're used to - I have the w1
bus working through the normal kernel infrastructure.
* YAFFS support - basically a recent pull from CVS with the 2.6.18
patches.
* USB host support via the Philips ISP116x.

Most of this is Nick's work and I've just forwarded ported it or deleted
huge swathes of it due to being able to reuse existing kernel code. One
thing I have made a start on is being able to use the same kernel on
different board types - you can pass a "balloon2_board=" parameter on
the kernel command line and it'll chose the board type based on that.
It's not quite there yet, but I think it's the way forward. My image is
compiled for a gurlap variant.

I have the remaining devices on my board to get working:

* RTC - this needs a simple SA11x0 GPIO I2C driver which won't take
long.
* LEDS - again, trivial to get going.
* USB client - I know this is something Nick wants so it's the next
thing on my list. I have his sa11x0_udc driver compiling ok, but
although it loads and detects the bus fine it doesn't work. More
frobbing needed.

I don't know what other devices are in common use that people want
supported. I guess audio is the main one, but are there others? I don't
really have a handle on what people are doing with the Balloons and in
what sort of quantity.

Any feedback anyone has on the 2.6.18 kernel would be interesting. I'm
not entirely sure how well new YAFFS interacts with old versions for
example.

J.

--
I am Pentium of Borg. Division is Futile. You will be approximated.