iMX53 or iMX51, any support?

[ILF]

OK, it seems the early hours and the fact that I was writing from my N900 hindered somewhat my explanation.

I know very well what and how arch linux is and works, as my workstation is basically Arch for the last 7 years or so. Before that I was CRUX user, and before that all the way back to red hat biltmore, and all this time I'm managing a ton of RedHat (both Fedora and EL) machines, so in a sense, I pretty much know what I'm doing (for the most part ).

The question about linaro is pretty reasonable, especially when dealing with ARM architecture, because of the amount of patches they produce for the toolchain (this beeing the gcc, gdb and qemu) and the kernel. As their idea was (and I still hope is) to accelerate linux adoption for arm. I thought this project could be using their efforts in that regard, as their patches don't get included immediately upstream. At one time I was using their toolchain to both build MeeGo for the igep and tinker with my PS3, again with the help of the igep .

As to the kernel, again the Freescale landing group (the freescale guys working on linaro) produces kind of a good kernel, so i'm going to try and use their 2.6.38 tree when compiling for the ArchARM.

And one last question, is the hardfp using vfp or neon and are you using thumb2 when compiling? (sorry for the dumb question, I found Arch has an ARM port about a week ago, and I'm still new here, so still exploring)

I will try to put Arch on the i.MX53 later today and I'll share my results here.

[kmihelich]

We use vfpv3-d16 in hard-float, which is the lowest common denominator since we also support Tegra2. No thumb interworking.

Standard CFLAGS used for compiling will be set in the omap-smp tarball, which are: -march=armv7-a -O2 -pipe -mfloat-abi=hard -mfpu=vfpv3-d16

I do know that Linaro does a lot for the state of ARM, I just don't use what they produce mainly because I haven't really had to. Arch tends to stay a version or two ahead of them in the toolchain, and I try to match Arch as best as possible. They also build softfp, not hard float, so the binaries they produce aren't compatible with us. I believe they're the last to still being doing softfp as well, everyone else that is making strides on ARM has gone with hard on v7 including MeeGo, Debian, and Fedora.

The kernel is where we generally deviate on our own and use what works, though I try to keep in line with upstream Arch as far as versions are concerned. So if what the Linaro team produces for a kernel works well on Freescale chips, by all means go that route.

[ILF]

OK, as promised I'm updating you on the status.

Seems the kernel in Freescale git repo tagged with rel_imx_2.6.38_11.09.01 is not working correctly. Serial console is screwed up after booting the kernel and when inserting an USB in any of the ports on the board, it just says Disabling IRQ #14.

However with the sources of 2.6.38.3 (this one linux-linaro-lt-mx5-2.6.38 - 2.6.38-1000.11 from here: https://launchpad.net/~linaro-landing-t ... /+packages) I got from Linaro the kernel output is finally working on the serial console + the serial console is working, after I edited /etc/inittab and replaced ttyS0 with ttymxc0 also the serial console is working. (don't forget to add ttsmxc0 to the /etc/securetty if you plan on loging as root). Also working is the USB (finally), however I'm not really sure if this is down to enabling the USB in IRAM (couldn't do that the first time) it requires patch 19/29 from here: http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.p ... nel/111608. So far the thing that is not working for some reason is the ethernet. ifconfig -a shows that there is eth0 device, but with hw addr of 00:00:00:00:00:00. I will check again my kernel later today. I don't know if the gpu and vpu are working properly yet, as I would like to tackle the eth issue now. The ipu though seems to be having issues, although I don't know how to really test it without any expansion boards. Also unknown is the status of i2c, spi, CAN (and FlexCAN), although it seems from the kernel log that they are initialized properly. Again I don't have expansion boards that I can test them with, though.

I will try to test the 2.6.39 and 3.0/3.1 kernels from linaro, however when running linaro on this board with .39 and 3.0/3.1 I had an issue with the USB, so I couldn't use k/b and mouse, so probably I'll still have those problems.

If someone needs my kernel .config, just let me know, I'll attach it later, cause I have to go out for couple of hours.

Edit: Sorry I forgot. The CPU seems to be working @800Mhz now, instead of 1Ghz. Probably it is something connected to power management or the cpu scaling. Will investigate that further, too.

[bmentink]

I would love to see some work start on a true Arch kernel for the i.MX53 .... don't you get problems with kernel modules not matching kernel version if you use say a Linaro kernel with an Arch filesystem?

Anyway kmihelich, would be great to see you make a start on the kernel for this CPU, it would appeal to may I believe, as the starter kit is so cheap ($140).

My 2c

It seems again my message did not come out correctly. I'm using the sources of the linaro kernel and I'm doing cross_compile on my arch workstation of the kernel. Sadly just completed the 3.1.0-rc9 from Linaro sources and tested. Managed to fix the USB problem from their kernels, however I still can't get the freaking lan to work. On a happy note, the accelerometer seems to be working though . Also unfortunatelly the CPU is still at 800 Mhz. It seems the problem is somewhere in the PMIC, but I don't know how the Ubuntu/Linaro guys are doing it. I'm trying to find their default kernel config so I can compare it with mine. Otherwise they compile from the same source and seems to be working for them.

Edit: I'm stupid and obviously very tired. The problem is the U-Boot. It doesn't set the MAC address of the FEC and doesn't set the CPU to 1 Ghz. I'll check what I did wrong when compiling it.

Edit 2: Just compiled U-Boot from linaro sources (2011.09-rc2) vs the git tree I was using (2011.09). Board is running at 1Ghz and ethernet is working. In other words I seem to have a fully working Arch on it.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '[')root@alarm ~]# uname -a
Linux alarm 3.1.0-rc9 #1 PREEMPT Fri Oct 21 05:01:04 EEST 2011 armv7l ARMv7 Processor rev 5 (v7l) Freescale MX53 LOCO Board GNU/Linux

[kmihelich]

Since I don't have one of these it's hard to test anything I build. So if someone comes up with a good kernel config (preferably for 3.0.x or 3.1-rc), I'll fire up a build for it. All I can really do is make it into a package for you guys to try out.

[ILF]

OK, just checked out Linus' git tree and switched to rc10. Unfortunately there are differences with Linaro's kernel. There isn't support for i.MX on chip Ethernet, the accelerometer, the i.MX section in the Device Drivers is missing, so no GPU and VPU support either. Also missing is the driver for the PMIC, which might prove to be larger problem than say GPU and VPU missing as there are ways to compile them as modules from other sources. So I'll stick with linaro's tree for now.

There seems to be parts from the support missing in 3.1-rc9 linaro tree also, though. There is no Sahara4 lite support (it was missing in i.MX 2.6.38 tree too, but Sahara2 was in), but also missing are the security extensions v2 from linaro kernel, so no luck there too. However if the security extensions of the CPU are not that important to you the best bet is the sources of the linaro kernel. I already sent my config to kmihelich so I hope he can package a kernel at some point, but we can not switch to mainline just yet .

[bmentink]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('kmihelich', 'S')ince I don't have one of these it's hard to test anything I build. So if someone comes up with a good kernel config (preferably for 3.0.x or 3.1-rc), I'll fire up a build for it. All I can really do is make it into a package for you guys to try out.

[kmihelich]

A kernel to test is in the repo, named linux-imx5 and based on Linaro sources for 3.1-rc9. Give it a shot and let me know what happens.

[ILF]

Hi all,

I'll test it tomorrow, as some other things came up and I don't have time for this right now.