Acer Chromebook CB5-311 mainline

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Re: Acer Chromebook CB5-311 mainline

Postby reey » Thu Jan 17, 2019 12:10 pm

I found the issue I had when using the nyan-big_defconfig for kernel compilation.
CONFIG_USB_XHCI_HCD and CONFIG_USB_XHCI_TEGRA were missing and CONFIG_USB_XHCI_TEGRA must be a module, because otherwise firmware loading fails, since the firmware is not compiled into the kernel.

I've compiled a working 4.20.2 kernel with this minimal config:
https://github.com/reey/PKGBUILDs/releases/tag/v4.20.2

At the moment I'm working on a uboot PKGBUILD for nyan-big, sources can be found here:
https://github.com/reey/PKGBUILDs/tree/ ... t-nyan-big
U-boot is working with this, but I need to include the extlinux.conf, so archlinux is not booting up with this at the moment.
The script in boot.txt does not seem to work, I think the bootz command is not working in uboot for some reason..

My plan in the future is to change the linux-nyan package, so that it will allow to have multiple kernel versions installed at once and with each installation of a kernel a boot entry will be added to the extlinux.conf.

I'm not sure if this will work, but we will see ;)

Also I sent the patches for u-boot to the mailing list yesterday. :)
reey
 
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Re: Acer Chromebook CB5-311 mainline

Postby reey » Thu Jan 24, 2019 8:43 am

So as @fedup had mentioned the changes to the dtsi files in 4.19 caused the problems with LPAE.
The changes made in:
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commi ... 74c3301424
to arch/arm/boot/dts/tegra124-nyan.dtsi and arch/arm/boot/dts/tegra124.dtsi need to be reverted.

With those changes reverted I'm getting 4GB of memory again.
I'm already in contact with Thierry Reding to fix this.

A compiled kernel can be found here: https://github.com/reey/PKGBUILDs/relea ... /v4.20.2-2
I only need to push my patches for the dtsi files..
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Re: Acer Chromebook CB5-311 mainline

Postby fedup » Thu Jan 24, 2019 3:34 pm

Hello reey
Glad it was the dtsi and easily sorted. I rebuilt the dtsi and voila 4GB back again. However u-boot, as you prevously stated is not booting LPAE kernels. It looks as though the u-boot kernel is not compiled with LPAE support, apparently it should still be able to boot LPAE kernels. I'll try rebuilding u-boot soon.
I Noticed that with the latest release stable kernels arch/arm/boot/dts/tegra124-nyan.dtsi has reverted but there are further changes to arch/arm/boot/dts/tegra124.dtsi. Maybe your email has got a quick response. It seems possible to boot different kernel with the same dtb file ie 4.20 booted fine with the dtb I built for 4.19.

Another question. Has anyone else got problems with a flickering mouse pointer? Seems worse with nouveau enabled and flickers with load or scrolling. I plan to try archlinux on a usb drive to see if the problems are related to Xorg on fedora. I'm unable to run wayland. Gdm never starts,the system boots but I have to jump to the console. Lightdm is fine but I seem to be having dithering display problems in xfce and the compositor isn't happy with nouveau.
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Re: Acer Chromebook CB5-311 mainline

Postby reey » Thu Jan 24, 2019 4:05 pm

@fedup
So I've already tried to compile u-boot with CONFIG_ARMV7_LPAE=y but it didn't work for me..

I'm not sure which kernel release you are talking about, since I didn't found any with a changed dtsi..

I had some problems with the stock debian kernel config with a flickering mouse pointer.
At the moment I'm running ubuntu without mouse flickering.
I'm not sure, what is caused that.
reey
 
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Re: Acer Chromebook CB5-311 mainline

Postby NoDiskNoFun » Fri Jan 25, 2019 6:09 am

@fedup: maybe its just my impression but if you set GPU frequency to a higher clock rate flickering gets much better.
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Re: Acer Chromebook CB5-311 mainline

Postby fedup » Fri Jan 25, 2019 10:09 am

Hello reey
whoops my mistake. I'd set my linux-stable git to 4.18.15 and forgot to change it back to latest stable so when I checked the dtbs files they were obviously ok again. I generally build the kernel the old way from the tar file and have only started using git to help figure out the changes that have messed up the nyan-big kernel. I'm struggling with learning how to use git at the moment.

Hello NoDiskNoFun
I've tried changing the pstate but whilst I can play H.264 video etc with nouveau enabled I find the feel of the desktop the to be worse than just using the framebuffer driver alone.

I'm not sure if the various revisions of the nyan chromebooks are important. Most of you have CB5-311 whilst I'm running on acer 13 C810, which on chromeos nyanbig rev3_7.

I've just had installed arch to a usb3 flash drive and the kernel I configured won't boot. The problem is that the tegra usb firmware need to be built into the kernel. ie. CONFIG_EXTRA_FIRMWARE="nvidia/tegra124/xusb.bin". With this it finds the root filesystem and boots ok. I suppose with u-boot I could use a ramdisk and add the firmware.
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Re: Acer Chromebook CB5-311 mainline

Postby vman » Sat Jan 26, 2019 5:49 pm

Hi reey, fedup, and nodisknofun,

as I can see you've been busy improving our Linux experience - great! Reey, sorry I didn't answer your question about the pull request for so long. I was assuming you'd know about them, since you're using github already. Github is where I first learned about the concept, and now I'm using it at work with various tools on our git repository. In brief it means "here are my changes to master (or whatever other branch you made changes to) - would you please accept/merge them?". With tools like github this should be more comfortable than sending patches by good old e-mail... but whatever way works is fine. ;-)

Actually what brought me back to this forum just now was an e-mail about a patch regarding the black screen issue:
https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/1031073/

I'm assuming when a patch is at that level it will eventually be merged to the official kernel? Having the compiled kernels from the various distros support booting directly could save us the trouble of re-compiling so much, so I'm really happy about that!

@fedup: I had flickering mouse pointer issues, more with XFCE than with KDE (plasma), if I remember correctly. In both cases I've been using the nouveau drivers. To me the desktop feels pretty good, and even better when I increase the GPU frequency. The main drawback is that video still is slightly smoother in ChromeOS. But even though using ChromeOS to watch videos only could be acceptable, that does not work in every case either, since I couldn't mount my network share from ChromeOS, and sometimes I do want to watch "recordings" instead of live streams from the Internet. I'll probably have to set up some kind of streaming server... And yes, I have the CB5-311 too. Actually I'm surprised the C810 is so similar to the CB5-311... black case instead of white, seems to be the main difference. ;-)
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Re: Acer Chromebook CB5-311 mainline

Postby reey » Sat Jan 26, 2019 8:06 pm

@vman
Github pull requests are easy, but sending patches via email is another thing ;)

the first comment on that patch is from me :D
If asked thierry if there is anything new about that patch.
I might also ask him for the CPU DFLL clock..

I'm hoping that this patch might be ported to the LTS kernels, so we might be able to use for example the ubuntu/debian installer in the near future :)
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Re: Acer Chromebook CB5-311 mainline

Postby fedup » Fri Feb 08, 2019 4:32 pm

@reey
Good to see your posts made with Thierry Reding. I see that the LPAE problem with u-boot maybe caused by coreboot. Maybe there is another method:-

Has anyone tried legacy boot on the tegra, see the link below. In theory a payload can be flashed to the RW_LEGACY section of the firmware. This would bypass the depthcharge verified boot process which may cause a problem when chainloading u-boot. With the write protection screw, coreboot should be safe? Not sure how to make suitable u-boot image as the payload but the commands cbfstool and flashrom are on the chromeos shell. Legacy boot needs to be enabled so type dev_boot_legacy=1 and then hit ctrl-L at the start screen. It would be nice if someone with a servo recovery board had tried this.

Edit..
Apparently Flashing the RW_LEGACY firmware is zero risk.

https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-tegra/msg20200.html
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Re: Acer Chromebook CB5-311 mainline

Postby reey » Fri Feb 08, 2019 7:37 pm

@fedup
at the moment I'm trying to replace the whole SPI flash with u-boot, but this legacy mode sounds also interesting.

I've been able to compile myself a working coreboot version, in which you don't have to press [crtl]+[d] to boot, it times out after 3 seconds :)

What I also found out, is that our chromebook is called nyan-big by google, but nvidia is referring to it as norrin or at the developer board was called like that..
nvidia has some tools which are using norrin, but I don't know, that this can be used for: https://github.com/NVIDIA/cbootimage-configs

This tool from Nvidia is quiet useful: https://github.com/NVIDIA/tegrarcm
with the instructions from https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/1019003/ and the configs from the cbootimage-configs git, I'm able to boot u-boot from my PC via a USB-A to USB-A cable onto the nyan-big.
Only problem is, that u-boot is not showing anything on screen, but after the timeout it is booting linux :)

But I think that this is only possible since I made my SPI flash unbootable :D
So I only need to find out at which offset the u-boot binary needs to be in the SPI chip in order to boot it :)

On the u-boot compiling side, I think I found out, that:
CONFIG_SYS_TEXT_BASE=0x81000100
is uniq to our nyan-big defconfig since all other tegra124 use another address..
The different address is used because of coreboot/depthcharge..

And I'm also trying to get manjaro build system to support nyan-big:
https://forum.manjaro.org/t/support-nya ... ded/74232/
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