[Gta04-owner] Kernel 3.16-rc2

[Neil Jerram]

Neil Jerram <neil at ossau.homelinux.net> writes:

> On 2014-06-26 23:48, Benjamin Deering wrote:
>
>> Neil, were you successful in booting 3.16-c2?
>
> No, not yet.  Also, something about how I copied the new kernel and
> modules onto one of my existing partitions has resulted in me no
> longer being able to boot the older kernel on that partition either
> (3.7.0-offmode-gta04+).
>
> On the other hand, I can still boot other partitions on the same SD
> card, so presumably the process of flashing the latest u-boot to NAND
> was successful.
>
> To be clear, my setup is:
> - P1: Replicant
> - P2: QtMoko
> - P3: My own userspace, with 3.7.0 and 3.16-rc2 kernels.
> - P4: Extended
> - P5: Shared media
> and I can now boot P1 and P2 but not P3.

Thanks to a shiny new serial cable, I've now debugged and fixed why the
older kernel wouldn't boot: the booting of the older, non-DT kernel was
derailed by the presence of a .dtb file in / - i.e. in the root of the
relevant MMC partition.

I had been suspicious about this before, and had moved the .dtb files
from /boot to / in order to try to hide them - but it appears that the
latest u-boot or bootargs looks for everything in both / and /boot, so
that didn't work.

Moving the .dtb files to /hide allows the old non-DT kernel to boot
again.

I guess this means that one can't easily mix pre-DT and DT kernels in
the same partition.  But I don't think that's a significant problem,
once understood.

Regards,
        Neil