GXBB: 4.12-rc1 boot failure (was DT: newbie questions)

[Chris Moore]

Hi,

  Le 17/05/2017 à 17:44, Neil Armstrong a écrit :
> On 05/17/2017 05:41 PM, Chris Moore wrote:
>> Le 16/05/2017 à 12:51, Chris Moore a écrit :
>>> Le 16/05/2017 à 10:08, Neil Armstrong a écrit :
>>>> On 05/16/2017 06:18 AM, Chris Moore wrote:
>>>>> Le 15/05/2017 à 11:28, Chris Moore a écrit :
>>>>>> I would like to add support for the cheap Chinese KI PLUS S905 boxes which seem very popular.
>>>>>> They are re-branded (or cloned) by several different vendors.
>>>>>> In particular the most serious seem to be:-
>>>>>> VideoStrong (http://www.videostrong.com/product.asp?sid=257)
>>>>>> Acemax (http://www.acemax.net.cn/droid-world/droid-box/hybrid-android-dvb-t2-dvb-s2/kii-pro-ki-plus-s2-t2-combo-149.html#.WRls_GjyiUk)
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I actually have an Xtreamer mxV (http://www.xtreamer.net/mxv) which seems to be an exact clone.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> My first question is what to put in the compatible line.
>>>>>> I could put:
>>>>>> a) compatible = "videostrong,kiplus", "acemax,kiplus", "xtreamer,mxv", "amlogic,meson-gxbb";
>>>>>> but there are many other KI PLUS vendors so I could maybe omit the vendor:
>>>>>> b) compatible = "kiplus", "xtreamer,mxv", "amlogic,meson-gxbb";
>>>>>> but this poses the problem of what to put in amlogic.txt which seems to require a vendor.
>>>>> Another solution to the multi-vendor problem could be to create a pseudo-vendor "generic" (or similar) and then have:
>>>>> c) compatible = "generic,kiplus", "xtreamer,mxv", "amlogic,meson-gxbb";
>>>>> Would this be acceptable?
>>>> Sorry, the generic is not really acceptable here since there is always a vendor, and adding a new
>>>> vendor is easy and well accepted.
>>>>
>>>> The point with Amlogic based Set-Top-Boxes is that they are 99% based on a reference design given
>>>> from Amlogic, and only the SBCs (Odroid-C*, Khadas, NanoPi K2) differs.
>>>>
>>>> Here is the list of Amlogic Reference Designs I am aware of :
>>>> - S905 : P200 and P201
>>>> - S905X : P212
>>>> - S905D : P230 and P231
>>>> - S912 : Q200 and Q201
>>>>
>>>> When pushing S905 based boxes, we were not really aware of that, but starting with S905X we started
>>>> to base the board DTS on the Reference Design DTSI like the Khadas Vim and the Wetek Hub/Play2.
>>>>
>>>> I'm aware there is a lot of work to clean up all the other S905/S905X and S912 based boxes... but
>>>> the majority of boxes should run unchanged with the reference design DTS.
>>> The KI PLUS has GXBB (S905), Fast (100Mbs) Ethernet, 1 GiB RAM, four USB ports and often Realtek RTL8189ETV WiFi.
>>>
>>> The P20x boards are probably the closest but they have Gigabit Ethernet and the KI PLUS only has Fast Ethernet.
>>> (Indeed the stock uBoot prompt and some Linux boot messages contain the string "p20x".)
>>> So, although obviously derived from these reference designs as you say, Ethernet doesn't work with the P200 and P201 DTS.
>>> Obviously working Ethernet is essential.
>> In fact the P201 probably does have Fast Ethernet.
> Yes, P201 should be the closest, it's basically P200 with 10/100 ethernet, and way simpler.
>
>> I remember that my board used to work well with the P201 DTB.
>> But this was with the Amlogic 3.14.y kernels.
>> In the mainline 4.x kernels it was incorrectly described with Gigabit Ethernet.
>> But I see that this has just been corrected in 4.12-rc1.
>> However unfortunately I cannot get 4.12-rc1 to boot: I get no kernel output at all on the serial console :(
>> I have never had any problems with the 4.10 and 4.11 series.
>>
>> Have you tried 4.12-rc1 on a GXBB board?
>> What bootargs do you recommend?
> Not yet, but this version should already boot some GXBB boards on kernelci.org

The problem was that my initrd was too big and something was obviously 
getting silently clobbered :(
(Both uBoot and the kernel move stuff around and decompress things.)

I had put all the kernel modules generated by the mainline arm64 
defconfig into my initrd and it had become very big.
Would it be possible to mainline an Amlogic specific version of the 
defconfig which would only include modules relevant to Amlogic boards?

Cheers,
Chris