lophilo

[stewart]

Hi All,

New to the list and arm, though an avid arch user.

I want to create get arch linux arm running on the lophilo platform. www.lophilo.com (code is on github.com/Lophilo/lophilo) Initially what I want to do is create a vanilla archlinux.img then emulate that with qemu.

How do I go about doing this?
I will work towards eventually supporting the fpga chip - baby steps.

Kind regards
Stewart

[kmihelich]

Looks like a really interesting device, especially with the Altera FGPA.

I see support in the mainline kernel for the Atmel AT91 SAM9M10 G45-EK evaluation kit, which should be a good starting place for getting a mainline kernel booting. If you were to use one of the older .30 kernels that seem to be standard, you would run into a lot of problems using our userspace.

The Altera chip shouldn't be hard to get running after you have U-Boot, a newer kernel, and the root filesystem in place. I imagine they have standard connections set up on the board to program it like other Altera boards.

[stewart]

Thank you - I wasnt aware that mainline supported the device.

Thought I suspect what the creators of the board want to do is patch linux such that you can program the fpga via the arm chip. So as a starting point the mainline is a good way to go!

[kmihelich]

The device itself isn't in mainline, but the evaluation board for the processor it uses is, which means that you can likely just go off of that board file to get everything working on the lophilo.

The processor is ARMv5TE, so you can use all of the v5 userspace stuff on it, and with a new enough kernel you can just drop the kernel into the v5 root filesystem and you should boot up just fine.

[stewart]

here is a copy paste from the creators of the board:

Absolutely, the chip is supported and that is why it was relatively easy to get Linux to boot by using that board as a starting point. However, that is for a particular development board built around the AT91SAM9M10 which differs in some ways with Lophilo: we don't have NAND flash, the GPIO pins we use are different, MPU features enabled/disabled are different. 

You can see some of the changes here:

https://github.com/Lophilo/linux/commit ... m10g45ek.c

The chip in that board is the same, but the board is not the same as our board.

The difficulty for us is to modify that particular board configuration to fit with our particular hardware instance which is not connected exactly in the same way as the development board AND add support for our reconfigurable hardware (the FPGA).