I just did a test compile of the Palm Pre kernel using the released sources. Worked out fine. At least the patching and compiling, no real tests without the hardware.
I took the kernel package and patch from the Palm open source website and used a toolchain built by OpenEmbedded for the beagleboard. Using OMAP3 and armv7a should match here.
The 2.6.24 kernel package itself while renamed has the same MD5 and SHA1 sum as the original tarball from kernel.org (tar.gz, plain 2.6.24 no stable version).
The 9.5 MB patch applied fine and using the omap_sirloin_3430_defconfig as config let me compile a zImage without problems. Another developer seem to have tested a selfcompiled kernel, should match mine, already. Hopefully we can expect some updates here.
Matthew Garret is blogging about the Linux based Palm Pre system.
I like a lot what I read there. Linux Kernel, OpenEmbedded, dbus based IPC, OMAP SoC, root on SD and more. I would design it mostly the same way. Wait, I'm missing 300 develoeprs and 300 Millions vanture capital here. To bad.
Really waiting for the kernel sources. It is using a MSM6xxx based modem for CDMA and I would bet just the brother, perhaps MSM6281 like the Samsung Omnia, for the GSM variant. As I'm hacking on the Omnia right know I would of cours be interested in a kernel driver to drive the modem. On the Omnia it is connected via a dual port ram chip that interfaces to the PXA312 on the other side.
This also is kinda similar to the MSM7k SoC's that are used in the available Android phones. Just that AP, ram and BP are in the same chip here.
And the driver for the CDMA modem should also be pretty similar to the GSM variant. That gives me a little hope that maybe a driver for such a dual port ram setup will be in the Palm Pre kernel sources. Let me know if you have details here.
Being a scuba diver I never seen one until recently.
After this bad joke we can come to some real infos. Harald is working on the kernel full steam ahead. Good progress so far. Sometimes faster sometimes slower.
From my side I concentraded on the OE side so far. Booting into a fso-image is working now. With every new hardware feature the kernel gets support for we can start to integrate it into FSO. GPS and BT are good candidates as they are just attached to UARTs and the enabling/disabling via GPIOs is already in the kernel.
A 'cat /dev/ttySAC2' already gives out some NMEA stancas. SiRF III binary protocol has to wait a bit longer. Next week I'll have some fun with making use of the GPS in frameword. Stay tuned.
While giving a talk and help to manning the OpenMoko booth at the LinuxTag I also got some interesting hardware to play with.
The great guys from the OLPC Deutschland e.V.long-term borrowed up to 70 XO laptops for people which have interesting projects with them.
I asked for one to work on OpenEmbedded integration for it. This divides into two parts:
Machine support. This one should not be to hard as it is a x86 device and the first rootfs it ever booted in the AMD labs was build with OE. :) Still it will help me to understand the deeper internals from OpenEmbedded better.
Writing recipes for the sugar applications and libraries. Having recipes for them in the OE metadata will make it easy for other distros using OE as their buildsystem to use them and put them in their feeds.
I will be busy with EZX the next two weeks. I plan to work on this afterwards.