The simplest building environment for iMX53 board.

[philippecavenel]

If somebody wants to build a linux kernel image for an i.MX53 board, do you know what is the simplest way to do the job ? TLIB, LINARO, other ? and on which Linux environment (distribution, version) ? If you have successfully experimented kernel build, please provide informations on that discussion.

[PaulFertser]

Hi,

I have to admit your reasoning is clean and clear, no kidding. Though i hope some day you'll discover the joy of working directly with upstream, communicating with the fine folks who actually develop all that wonderful stuff, contributing to the kernel etc.  Have a nice weekend too, and good luck with your projects! :)

[philippecavenel]

Hello Paul. You have perfectly right, my problem is not to build from scratch the latest Linux environment for iMX board. I just need a working environment to add some specific stuff such as FTDI driver and that's it. I don't want to compare OE and ltib, and I think I have no skill for that. I just observe that on one side, I have OE that doesn't work today to build the environment I need, and on the other side, I have ltib that does the job for me, and it's not so much painful :-). I don't care if it's an old release. If it works for what I have to do, it's enough. My business is somewhere else. But  if you can provide a working environment for that board with OE, a simple tool to install and use, I am sure that many people will appreciate your effort. I wish you a nice week-end :-)

[PaulFertser]

philippe cavenel said:

a real professional environment

...

vmware ubuntu image with ltib

...

ltib with vmware image coming from Freescale

Well, it looks like you have no clue whatsoever about real low level development with GNU/Linux systems, i'm sorry to say that. Do you have any kernel commits upstream even? How do you compare OE with that ltib thing? Isn't it the OE that contributes most fixes for cross-compiling numerous software? How many different programs can you cross-build with ltib? How old are the versions you can build? Where's the ltib git tree, eh?

[philippecavenel]

Definitely, ltib with vmware image coming from Freescale is running fine. This is the best way to proceed for starting.

[philippecavenel]

So, Paul, here is my point of view, sorry to be direct, but I think that what you propose for my problem is just a waste of time... :-) I can't compile OpenEmbedded environment for iMX board. I guess OpenEmbedded could be nice for other environments ready to be used with this tool, but what I need in fact is a real professional environment, not a hobby time tool for my weekend :-) . On other forum, I discovered that vmware ubuntu image with ltib is the best way to follow, so I am going to test ltib in vmware ubuntu image, hoping that It will work.

[philippecavenel]

OK, I am going to do the job. Hope it will work. I will give back my experience on this discussion. Many thanks for your time Paul.

[PaulFertser]

Well... OE is a nice community supported distro with many talented programmers working on it.

[philippecavenel]

Paul, what do you mean by "easy to add"... a round trip to the moon ? :-) because at that time, this is what I have with linaro and ltib...

[PaulFertser]

Hey. I can tell you that both OpenWrt and OE might lack a ready-made configuration for iMX53 but it should be easy to add. OE is kind of Gentoo for embedded, and you'll have to solve some riddles sometimes but it seems to be the only sane way to cross-compile a modern fully-functional OS.

[philippecavenel]

Hey Paul, ok I am going to try OpenEmbedded, thanks for the information, I didn't know. Concerning OpenWrt, I am not sure that iMX53 is already supported.

[PaulFertser]

And if you're building a whole distro, then i can recommend OE (for pda-like devices) or OpenWrt (for more constrained devices), they're both great.

And of course there's always an option of native compilation, you can do that with Debian or (afaik) RedHat, and just build whatever you need natively or on another arm device (e.g. sheevaplug).

[PaulFertser]

Come on, you do not need any environment, any arm toolchain will do, e.g. the one you can install from emdebian or whatever your distro has to offer. Then do "make ARCH=arm menuconfig" and "make CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabi- ARCH=arm uImage" (or zImage or whatever).

[philippecavenel]

I installed all  the requested packages. ltib didn't compile immediately on my linux distributions (I tried with opensuse and ubuntu). I had to fix some compilation problems in order to get the smallest profiles working fine ( "preconfig (Min Profile)", "Minimum bootable root filesystem").  But unfortunately, those profiles do not contain enough binaries for what I am looking for my business (JAVA environment, network access, package installation). So  I tried to build  "FSL gnome release package" and it failed. I get some blocking compilation problem in ORBIt2. I don't know how to fix it and I can't remove it from "FSL gnome release package" profile in order to go further. So at that time I need help. I opened a new discussion on that topic concerning ORBIt2 compilation problem.

I am wondering why all the default environments proposed by Freescale are not fully tested ? Is it too complex ? and therefore, I am still wondering if ltib is the best environment to work with.

[VladanJovanovic]

No, I meant IMX53_1105_LINUXDOCS_BUNDLE that you can download from:

http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=i.MX535&nodeId=018rH3ZrDR988D&fpsp=1&...

Look into the archive for document called: i.MX53_START_Linux_BSP_UserGuide.pdf

Plenty of other very useful documents in that package as well...

philippe cavenel said:

OK, I agree. So I just found  that presentation on the net in http://ltib.org/pages/LTIB_generic_v1.4_-_version_6.4.1.pdf ? is it up to date according to you ? Is it the user's guide you are talking about ?

[KrishnaPavan]

When you run ./ltib itself you will get message that .......these packages have to be installed.

You can use Synaptic PM or sudo apt.....commands, or other process to download and install packages.

You mentioned a link .... http://ltib.org/pages/LTIB_generic_v1.4_-_version_6.4.1.pdf , that you can refer after installing all the supporting packages

[philippecavenel]

OK, I agree. So I just found  that presentation on the net in http://ltib.org/pages/LTIB_generic_v1.4_-_version_6.4.1.pdf ? is it up to date according to you ? Is it the user's guide you are talking about ?

[VladanJovanovic]

OK, so problem probably isn't to build the image, but to flash it properly. That's another thing.

1. follow instructions in START User's Guide from Linux documentation package to program bootloader (located in rootfs/boot/ folder of your LTIB build) to SD card. This is quite simple and should always boot.

2. try to start the bootloader from SD card. Does it show anything on serial port? If yes, go step 3, otherwise back to step 1 :-)

3. Follow instructions in user's guide to program kernel image.

4. Boot into uboot, interrupt the boot process and set up boot parameters according to user's guide. Save boot parameters and reboot. Does kernel start to execute after uboot? If yes then 5...

5. Set up file system parameters to kernel (either through NFS or format SD card and set params accordingly...)

One step at a time and you can get this to work quite easily...

[philippecavenel]

Nothing happens on the board with the image I built, but I have had to modify mtd-utils during the compilation... Compilation failed on this package and I removed -Werror flag in all Makefiles in order to compile it correctly. The other problem is that I don't know if the dd command that I used is correct ? That's the reason why I am looking for a simple environment. On LINARO, when you get an image, it is quite simple to install it on the sd card, you just have to run a linaro-media-create command and it works fine, unfortunately, I can't compile kernel on UBUNTU 11.04 because I got an error in dpkg-buildpackage, so for the present time, it's just a nightmare to build an armel kernel :-) If you know that LTIB functioned well on 11.04 could you please give me a link where I can find the corresponding LTIB distribution ?

[KrishnaPavan]

If the Kernel did not boot properly then you might have got an error in the report, just see through.........

I know that LTIB functioned well on 11.04, but I have not checked on 11.10.

[VladanJovanovic]

Why didn't the kernel boot?