Towards Core (microcore) on Raspberry Pi

[bmarkus]

Tested with different QEMU versions on WINDOWS.

1.0.x - kernel panic, same as on TC
1.1.x - OK
1.2.x - OK

Would be good a QEMU 1.2 update

[curaga]

I'm really short on time nowadays.  Feel free to post an update, the configure arguments are in the usual place:
ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/metalab/distributions/tinycorelinux/4.x/x86/tcz/src/qemu

[bmarkus]

I'm really short on time nowadays.  Feel free to post an update, the configure arguments are in the usual place:
ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/metalab/distributions/tinycorelinux/4.x/x86/tcz/src/qemu

Thanks for the link.

Now I have QEMU-1.2.0 built on TC. It looks OK, Raspbian qemu-kernel works like on the WINDOWS version, piCore 4.6.1 starts. I will submit it after some testing and fine tuning.

[bmarkus]

Status after more testing. piCore using qemu-kernel from the Raspbian emulator for Windows works on TC 4.6.1 except kernel modules due to the mismatch of kernel versions. Raspbian 2012-07-15 works fine in console mode. Starting X it continously restarts (telinit 5), startx seems to be freezing after the raspberry image, don't know why. Same setup is OK on Windows.

Anyhow, it can be a usable starting for piCore and QEMU variant of piCore kernel.

There are 'pflash write unimplemented command sequence...' errors during boot. There is a patch, applying it this goes away and replaced with more flash related errors, so I didn't apply the patch. Do not know is it related to X problem or not.

Anyhow, it is not for the first version.

[roberts]

The posted http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/4.x/arm/armv6/rpiCore-20120907.img.gz
seems to be testing quite well.

I am using a pendrive for my backup and extensions. It is recognized and is easily available via
the standard mount /mnt/sda1. You can backup and restore from it, you can tce-setdrive it.
You can tce-load -i links and it will use the link /etc/sysconfig/tcedir. All that seems to be working.

You can easily specify the usual boot commands by editing cmdline.txt, e.g., waitusb=5:LABEL=mypi tce=LABEL=mypi
 onboot works as expected!.

[bmarkus]

A friend of my reported that my first extension, john.tcz  installs fine and works.

[bmarkus]

Now it runs in QEMU perfectly, on WINDOWS as well as TC. This screen is captured on TC 4.6 (x86) running piCore 4.6.1 in QEMU:

[vinnie]

as soon as the package is ready I will try to test 

[bmarkus]

To test piCore I started to build extensions, first with those with no dependency. Than built ncurses in the same splitup as on x86. ncurses used by many CLI programs. Next test was building iptraf and htop using ncurses. Everything is working on the same way as x86 core with the newly built tcz's, see



To build extensions I'm using Raspbian running in QEMU on WINDOWS with a shared virtual drive used by both Raspbian and piCore to make file transfer easy. My original build scripts are working with very little modification, in most cases it is enough just to remove Intel references in CC and CCX compiler options.

All together result is very positive, piCore works as expected.

[roberts]

I have posted an updated image. Please note the change in directory on server.
See http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/4.x/armv6/

This update fixes broken library links.

Also now posted the first extensions:
See http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/4.x/armv6/tcz
A big THANK-YOU goes to bmarkus!

I have also created the support databases, tags, info, size, and md5, so that tce-ab from raspberrypi now works.

[bmarkus]

Great, I see the repo with tce-ab and links are OK now.

I do not find libz.so.1 in the base; it is there in the x86 version. Possibly there are more missing libs.

[roberts]

bmarkus, I just sent you another cut of the qemuCoreFiles with libz.
Please test and if good I will update rpiCore.img

[bmarkus]

Robert, still it doesn't work for me, see

[roberts]

Re-sent qemuCoreFiles.tgz. libz now passes ldd test.

[bmarkus]

Now it is OK.