Category: agestar

It has been a long time since I started this project, and even though I am making a good progress at the beginning, my progress was getting slower lately. Today I decided to take a day off from work to finish some remaining task: network driver, automatic memory detection, and flash device support.

Pyun YongHyeon have helped me a lot with the network driver. The speed is still not good, but he have helped to make the network driver to more correct (better, more reliable). I will still need to ask him to check for the final version, but I believe I have fixed most errors he pointed out.

My agestar, which also uses CNS11XX devices comes with 32Mb memory, while the Emprex NSD-100 have 64mb of memory. I have added a code to autodetect the memory size. So one binary file should work on both devices.

The flash device in Emprex NSD-100 complies with CFI, and it was very easy to use with the existing CFI driver. I just need to write several lines of code. The next step is to boot freebsd directly from the flash (with the root filesystem on USB). Unlike in Linux, the flash device can not be accessed as partitions (not yet).

First, we need to write the kernel.bin to cfi0, because the first 132 kb is used by boot loader, we need to skip to somewhere > 132kb. To make it easy, i just skip 1 megabyte from beginning of flash.

dd if=kernel.bin seek=1 bs=1m of=/dev/cfi0

be very very very careful with the dd command. Without correct seek and bs, you may overwrite the bootloader. The command will take quite a long time to finish (3 minutes).

Next step is to set the initial boot command. In the boot loader, setup bootcmd to copy the data in ram to 0x1000000 from 0x10100000, then boot the device:

setenv bootcmd cp.l 0x10100000 0x1000000 0x1a0000\;go 0x1000000
saveenv

Now when we boot the device, we should go directly to freebsd.

I won’t provide binaries, but the latest source code is in:

http://p4db.freebsd.org/depotTreeBrowser.cgi?FSPC=//depot/projects/str91xx/src/sys/arm/econa&HIDEDEL=NO

Last weekend I continued my work on FreeBSD port. I am concentrating on the network speed improvement, and I made a good progress with it. The network speed is now about 2.1 Mbps (FTP upload from device), this is still slower than the Linux version but i think it already reach a usable state (I think I should be able to stream some DivX files through HTTP from it). I will ask around in the freebsd-arm/freebsd-net mailing list so I can do more improvement on the driver.

I am still a bit worried playing around with the Flash, since I don’t have anything to restore it back in case I made a mistake. So I think I will leave this part for a while.

For everyone who have NSD-100 with Serial Port attached to it, you can try a precompiled binary thah I have prepared, or you can compile from source. To use the binary version, you will need a USB disk (at least 2GB in size), and a TFTP server. Actually you only need about 256 megabyte if you prepare your own disk instead of using my image.

Here are the steps for the binary version:

1. Download the disk image from here
2. Decompress (bunzip) the disk image, use dd to write to your USB disk
3. Since there is no boot menu, entering single or multi user mode is done by booting different kernel. Download the multi user kernel or single user kernel and put it in your tftpserver
4. Boot the kernel

To boot the kernel, you need to access your device using serial port. I think You need to hold the reset button to enter the boot prompt (mine always goes to the boot prompt because Bruce did something with the configuration area). You should see

STR9100>

prompt.

setenv serverip 192.168.1.1
(you can also 'saveenv' to save the TFTP server address permanently)
tftpboot 0x1000000 name-of-kernel.bin
go 0x1000000

To build your own disk image, make an empty disk.img with the size that you want. Goto /usr/src and then (modified from instruction to make i386 image by Warner Losh)

export TARGET_ARCH=arm
make buildworld
mdconfig -a -t vnode -f disk.img
fdisk -I md0
fdisk -B md0
bsdlabel -w md0s1 auto
bsdlabel -B md0s1
newfs /dev/md0s1a
mount /dev/md0s1a /mnt/
make installworld DESTDIR=/mnt
make distrib-dirs DESTDIR=/mnt
make distribution DESTDIR=/mnt
echo /dev/da0s1a / ufs rw 1 1 > /mnt/etc/fstab
echo ifconfig_DEFAULT=DHCP > /mnt/etc/rc.conf
echo hostname=demo >> /mnt/etc/rc.conf

To compare your boot experience here is is the bootlog for the multi user mode, and the single user mode.

For the latest kernel source, you can see the perforce depot at:

http://p4db.freebsd.org/depotTreeBrowser.cgi?FSPC=//depot/projects/str91xx&HIDEDEL=NO

I’m still working on the Freebsd port, and haven’t tried to fix the network driver problem in Linux (it only happens on samba 3 which I don’t use daily). The reason to focus my work on the FreeBSD port is because I want to understand more about the network driver. The current Linux network driver was not written from scratch but from modifying existing source. The source was full of things that I don’t understand, which proves to be unnecessary after I gain understanding when writing the Freebsd network driver.

Here is the current FreeBSD port status:

1. Timer is now working, previously the timer tick works, but the time counter was too fast.
2. EHCI and OHCI is working, but there is still some caching problem, so i need to modify usb_busdma.c, this modification is not clean. I can access USB disks, and USB network adapter.
3. Network driver works, but it is still very slow . I am still trying to understand better the DMA handling in FreeBSD. There is still one bug: you can not stop the interface and start it again. The stopping part works, ifconfig ece0 down, but the starting again part doesn’t.
4. Multi user works. I can also activate network services, such as sshd.

I am still waiting for my perforce account. But anyone willing to test it can contact me. I still don’t know the best method to release a patch against CURRENT for people to try, because changes happens very quickly.

Here is the latest boot log: bsd-24-may-2009.txt