[Gta04-owner] We need an Android kernel

[Paul Kocialkowski]

Le mercredi 17 juillet 2013 à 11:00 +0200, Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller a
écrit :
> >> As far as I know, mainline is far from offering complete support for
> >> DM37x, which is why there are so many platform-specific kernels out
> >> there (such as rowboat).
> 
> Hm I have the contrary impression - at least for non-android systems.
> 
> Kernel 3.7 (especially our neil-brown-plus) kernel supports almost all
> features we want and is running quite well on the DM3730 (maybe except
> some special 1 GHz issues). So why not use this (and try to push things
> to mainline).

Ok, so I'll start with neil-plus 3.7 branch instead of 3.4. We'll see
what the outcome is.

> We could even use the SGX blobs for development/debugging purposes
> and wait for the FSF PowerVR reverse engineering project to provide some
> results. The SGX drivers in kernel space are already included in the
> neil-brown-plus tree.

Sadly, I am not really convinced we'll get anything out of the PowerVR
reverse engineering effort in the next few years so we don't count on it
at all.

> Maybe Replicant and the PowerVR RE together may get more traction than
> each one taken alone.

Replicant doesn't plan on working on PowerVR RE at all. We simply don't
have time for that huge task.

> I did look into the neil-brown sources and we can simply enable some CONFIG_ANDROID
> features which are in 'staging'.
> 
>  #
>  # Android
>  #
> -# CONFIG_ANDROID is not set
> +CONFIG_ANDROID=y
> +CONFIG_ANDROID_BINDER_IPC=y
> +CONFIG_ASHMEM=y
> +CONFIG_ANDROID_LOGGER=y
> +CONFIG_ANDROID_TIMED_OUTPUT=y
> +CONFIG_ANDROID_TIMED_GPIO=y
> +CONFIG_ANDROID_LOW_MEMORY_KILLER=y
> +CONFIG_ANDROID_INTF_ALARM_DEV=y
>  # CONFIG_PHONE is not set
>  # CONFIG_USB_WPAN_HCD is not set
>  # CONFIG_IPACK_BUS is not set
> 
> I can't tell if this is complete or has problems, but it compiles fine and the extended kernel
> still works with Debian.

Ok I'll try.

> 
> I have tried to boot the replicant 4.0 rootfs on this kernel, but it fails because it does
> not find the init process. And I was not yet able to find the location of the 'init' binary
> in the Replicant roofs to simply make a copy/symlink to /sbin/init (where the mainline
> kernel apparently tries to locate it).

You need the android initramfs.