Kernel 3.8.1 for testing - no aufs3 yet

[moonman]

I've readied kernel 3.8.1, but since there still is no aufs3 for 3.8, this is not official yet. If you would like to test-drive the new 3.8.1, here it is:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', 'pacman -U https://dl.dropbox.com/u/15043728/kernel381/linux-kirkwood-3.8.1-0-arm.pkg.tar.xz https://dl.dropbox.com/u/15043728/kernel381/linux-headers-kirkwood-3.8.1-0-arm.pkg.tar.xz')

[ebbix]

Cool, you adjusted the patches. Was it harder than with 3.7? At least 3.8-rc1 ran fine using 3.7 patches.

By the way: Have you got any plans for post-3.8 yet? I think it will become harder and harder to patch kernels to not use device tree.
3.9 will include a nice kirkwood-cpufreq driver to throttle cpu to ddr clock (400 MHz afaik) which will most likely only work with device tree bindings. (Although you could heavily patch it though)
I don't know if device tree files will be ready to use this feature on 3.9 yet (planning to test this with rc1 later, 3.8.2 just finished compiling), but eventually non-dt users will miss cool features. And device tree would reduce the number of patches needed. On my GoFlex Net, the only patch needed is a one that changes NAND chip delay to 40 in the device tree file.
However, there is still the problem of booting those device-tree kernels.
The only long-term solutions I can imagine are either a new U-boot with device tree support or a script to stitch kernel and device tree blob like this:
$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', 'cat correct_device_tree_blob_for_device.dtb >> zImage
makeimage etc. pp.')However, this would render devices unbootable if the wrong device tree blob or no blob at all is appended.

[moonman]

Not much needed to be changed. The biggest changes were to NSA310 as I had to fix the driver for temperature monitoring (some macros was deprecated) and DT was added for it so it was interfering with the patch (removed DT support).

Kurlon is working on DT support for ALARM AFAIK. There's a DTcalipse thread on the forum somewhere. The problem there I guess is that we don't have a DT enabled U-Boot and how will the script detect the device it is running on. Sure it can go and look for the arcNumber, but not everybody has those set properly. Also I would imagine most GF Home/Net users still have the old UBIT as their bootloader which doesn't even support kernels past 3.2 as that's what installation instructions tell them to install.

[ebbix]

Well yeah I know about Kurlon's thread.
For the old UBIT users, this would not matter at all because they couldn't even run linux-kirkwood at the moment afaik.
But selecting the correct device (tree) automatically would be the hardest problem...
Anyway, I checked 3.9-rc1 yesterday, but I couldn't enable cpufreq-kirkwood due to dependency problems. (Seems like some PLATFORM_HAS_CPUFREQ-like configs are not set in the makefile or something like that, I didn't dig deeper).