I've been working with a robot from school, basically an EDB9302 ARM mobo/CPU combo from Cirrus Logic. It's been a pain. This is the page for the (now discontinued) product: http://www.charmedlabs.com/index.php?op … view&id=29 The robot runs a barebones linux system with kernel version 2.6.8. I've been trying to upgrade the kernel, but once I got that working, I found that I had to upgrade everything else as well. So now I come to a choice. I can stick with the “magic” system that Cirrus Logic puts out to generate firmware images. Or I can try to get Arch running on there, off of a flash drive if it's too big (the board has 16 MB of flash ROM). I have a working cross compilation environment, and I like the automation that Arch would provide, and I really want to get away from the massive system of shell scripts and Makefiles that Cirrus Logic put together to make basic “firmware images” for the board.

If I went the Arch route… I wouldn't be looking to start a full port or anything. The ARM architecture is too diverse for a single kernel to support, so getting a full distro would be a pain. What I would like to do would be to use my cross compiler to get a basic Arch install on a flash drive and work from there. I dunno if I would just boot from the flash drive or try to put a setup into ROM. Is this worth the effort? I like PKGBUILDs, and I would like having a solid base to work from, but is it worth the time it would take to actually get things running? If there's anyone reading this that has done something of this sort, what pitfalls should I be aware of? I don't need a full port, all I can really run is a basic system, so there's not too much that needs to be moved over. Right now, if I push through with the Cirrus logic package, I'm basically going to be remaking their package for them, and I really loathe the idea of tracing their Makefiles through their shell scripts to get everything to actually build against the new kernel. Plus everything is out of date anyway, so I'd have to redownload it all… Ugh.

arch.txt · Last modified: 2014/09/17 15:08 by archmobile
 
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