i.MX515 Project Gentoo/ARM support in category Linux Distributions proposed by Raúl Porcel on 16th March 2009 (accepted on 2nd July 2010) [View Full Project]

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	Board arrived posted by Raúl Porcel on 10th December 2009 Hello everyone, I got the board on Monday finally, although i wasn't at home until wednesday. I haven't done too much as of now, as I was fighting with it until late yesterday, when i started building Gentoo on it. I'll write here the issues i encountered: -First, the U-boot included doesn't support tftpboot, which means i need to put the kernel on a storage device. Guess i rely to much on the network :) I've been told this is due that the ethernet card is USB-based, and U-Boot doesn't support that very well. -Second, I can't have the root filesystem on NFS: The 4GB on the SSD are a bit short for me :) And even when i tried using it, I ran out of inodes. Since the ethernet card is USB-based it takes some time to initialize it, that means that the kernel is unable to configure the ethernet card as it configures it before it is initialized. It's something like USB storage devices, however with those you have the rootdelay parameter, but i haven't been able to find something like that for the ip configuration of the kernel for the NFS root. PS: for trying this i had to recompile the kernel including the NFS module as built-in, so the NFS root function could work. -Third, USB is slow. After giving up on the two things above, i tried booting it from an 8GB USB stick, containing an armv5tel stage3. Either the USB transfer is really slow, or its due to the armv5tel stage... I gave up on this one as well. At the end i've done the following: -Boot the installed ubuntu -Mount through NFS an HDD on another machine -Extract an armv5tel stage3 on NFS and rebuild world with the following options in make.conf: CFLAGS="-Os -march=armv7-a -mthumb -mfpu=vfp -mfloat-abi=softfp -pipe" CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}" CHOST="armv7a-unknown-linux-gnueabi" That's what its doing now. More stuff soon