booting beagle-xm with tidspbridge

Thanks to Andresj, I got a good reason to dust off my beagle-xm and the dsp inside it.

So, this post is just a quickie about booting and poking the dsp, even though Andresj intends to bring up dsplink, me, being a complete noob on the subject, will just swap it for tidspbridge.

There are probably a lot of posts and wikis[1][2][3][4] detailing these steps, but what the hell, one (this one) polluting the web space doesn't hurt much, besides I'm not going to detail each point.

In the "nearly-done-from-scratch" world, you should have:

• ARM GCC to compile your x-load (MLO), u-boot, uImage (vanilla kernel or linux-omap kernel) and fileystem + utilities (I use buildroot), besides of your user space apps.
• TI's CGT and BIOS to compile dsp binaries.
• Filesystem storage: NFS, MMC or NAND.

If not, you could try my rootfs and mount it on MMC.

UPDATE: Remember to change the rootfs files owner (chown) and group (chgrp) to "root" after decompressing into MMC or for NFS boot.

In rootfs/etc/inittab, change ttyS0 for ttyO2 (on latest kernels, previously ttyS2)
In rootfs/etc/securetty, add ttyO2 (on latest kernels, previously ttyS2)

Compile your kernel with tidspbridge and copy to the uImage to mmc, the modules should go to the filesystem.

I was using 2.6.38-rc3 with omap2plus_defconfig. I noticed a strange issue though: if you let the kernel booting messages through the console, you get a panic because mmc couldn't be mounted.

UPDATE: Thanks to Vaibhav for pointing out, you can set rootwait on your bootargs, solving above mmc detection problem.

And in u-boot.

set bootargs 'mem=512M console=ttyO2,115200n8 noinitrd root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rw rootwait'

Be sure your boot.scr or the default environment variables doesn't override your bootargs, I had to modify mine, so the mmcboot didn't overwrite the bootargs.

set mmcboot 'bootm ${loadaddr}'

Then.

bootd

If everything went well, you can login as root and try the gst commands from one of my previous posts. Enjoi :P

Usual solutions to random problems

Compiling

• Export your compiler path before cross-compiling, and also your CROSS_COMPILE variable, in some cases even the ARCH variable might be needed too.
• Configure your target defconfig.
• Remember to take mkimage from u-boot project to compile the uImage, you should put it under a folder in your PATH.

Booting

• No messages: recheck serial, USB-serial connections; check settings with the emulation terminal (usual ones are the port and speed configs, 115200n8); check MLO and SDcard, recompile & reflash if needed.
• X-loader hangs: check u-boot, recompile & reflash if needed.
• Kernel hangs in "Starting kernel": Something went horribly wrong enable earlyprintk to debug (with the right tty).
• Kernel hangs in "Uncompressing Linux...": Recheck your bootargs (most common errors are that kernel throws messages through ttyS0, but bootargs listen ttyS2).
  
• Kernel hangs around "Freeing init...": Recheck the same tty stuff in your file system /etc/inittab.
• Filesystem doesn't allow login: check your configured users; add the tty to the list in /etc/securetty.
• Kernel panic while mounting FS:
• NFS: check NFS server settings and exports; check bootargs; check file system path in server and bootargs; check ip, serverip, nfs server ip.
• MMC: check bootargs; check filesystem partition in bootargs; check the SD card, if possible try another one.