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lab11 / signpost

Exploring what happens when you put computers on sign posts.
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Are you considering to use newer kernel on Edison? #44

Open andy-shev opened 7 years ago

andy-shev commented 7 years ago

Just wondering if you are considering to switch to vanilla kernel at some point.

bradjc commented 7 years ago

I'm not sure what you mean by "vanilla", but we would love to use a newer kernel. If we could get to 4.5+ we could natively support the CC2520 that we have on some of our boards.

andy-shev commented 7 years ago

Vanilla is a standard name of upstream available kernel.

v4.11-rc1 supports almost everything important on Intel Edison out-of-the box, including x86_64 build. The progress on it is described on community wiki.

ppannuto commented 7 years ago

@nealjack thoughts? It'd be great to jump up, but the missing power unit and power button support (esp the latter) give me some pause.

andy-shev commented 7 years ago

@ppannuto To clarify a bit. There are two power related MCUs inside Atom SoCs:

  1. PMU (in some it's called PMC), which takes care of South Complex devices (the driver is in upstream!).
  2. Power Unit is another one which controls North Complex devices, that are not used on Intel Edison anyhow (AFAIR), there is a debug support in upstream which allows you to see (read) the current power state of those devices. That's why the support of it is low priority.

Regarding power button, I would ask Ingo Molnar or Thomas Gleixner to apply rest of the patches which are needed to enable it (actually one patch is needed) to next v4.11-rcX. I can't promise it will go to it, so v4.12 is for sure.

Don't hesitate to ask any question either by email (public mailing lists, Intel community forums, etc.) or thru GitHub.

nealjack commented 7 years ago

When I find some time this week, I'll give the new kernel a try. I wasn't aware Intel was still maintaining the Edison kernel. I built the current Signpost image from what is available from here, and used a Debian rootfs.

andy-shev commented 7 years ago

@nealjack Even that is old one. Latest official BSP v3.5 is dated 6.06.2016. Yeah, it has v3.10.98 based kernel, but at least a bit newer than initial one.

My kernel is unofficial. I'm doing this most likely as a hobby because I like the hardware and platform. Same regarding U-Boot support and upstreaming.

andy-shev commented 7 years ago

Power Button support is in v4.11-rc3 (and so in my branch here on GitHub).

victorconka commented 7 years ago

Hi @andy-shev, I'd really wanted to try and use your kernel because of the SPI driver and DMA support. Is there a way of building your kernel using the BSP v3.5 is dated 6.06.2016? I want this mostly because it seems easier to me to include new modules and try them through patches and bitbake.

andy-shev commented 7 years ago

@vsobolyev It would be really appreciated, though I have 0 experience with Yocto (bitbake), so I dunno how to answer to your question.

UPDATE. The user space environment is not compatible with newer kernel APIs, so, prepare to have a massive breakage there if you rely on some old (non-upstream-compatible) behaviour. Otherwise you may build new kernel as usual, better to take my branch since it has few more fixes on top of upstream,

victorconka commented 7 years ago

@andy-shev Things were breaking as I was writing you hehe. Thanx for the info. Will give try to the usual build later on.

andy-shev commented 7 years ago

@vsobolyev You are welcome. One remark, it might be better to use issue tracker in my repository to avoid noise here. Since there is no automated way to move some comments as a new issue in other repository, feel free to create one an put there comments that matters.