Good morning, all. Thanks, Josh and Phil for your replies. Turns out that when I was given the Linux PC a few months ago, several things were not properly installed. There wasn't a ramdisk in my directory structure, but when I went back and searched for it (amazing what you can find when you know to look for them!), I found a ramdisk.gz file. I'm now booting the linux kernel. YAYAY.
A couple of things, as a follow-on. Josh, I didn't want to remove the DHCP from the compilation, totally, because when I'm troubleshooting boards in the lab, I will want it, and I didn't want to change the compiler, just the environment vars. I got the bootarg setting (to disable the DHCP) directly from an e-mail from my Texas Instruments contact. It works, but I think there is still a minor syntax error. If you can remember about the command line args, please let me know. Thanks. Phil, I knew when I was typing it, that gzip followed by zip wasn't needed, but I was doing a cut&paste from a wiki page. I'm guessing, but it appears to be there mostly as a logic break, so that you can make mulitple rep's of the unzip-mount-mkdir-unmount-zip, as needed in the future. Anyway, real follow-up question is: If for whatever reason I want to do the whole "build ramdisk" in the future, what files do I need to add? The same wiki page that said "Create whatever directories you want" also made a reference to 'busybox' (but not being a unix/linus type, I've never used it). Would that be sufficient? It's not on my Linux PC, so I would assume from the Net? Hidden on one of the DVEVM install disks? Again, thank you both for you help. Major progress in a single afternoon!!! Regards, James Long When I wanted to remove the very long time delay from DHCP (because I’m using a static IP address) I only removed DHCP from the kernel compilation and not the entire Ethernet. There is also a way I’ve seen mentioned on this list on how to not have it check DHCP from the command line arguments to the kernel but I have forgotten it. I know that doesn’t answer your question at hand but it’s something you can try later. Josh Phil Quiney <[email protected]> 12/18/2008 12:52 PM To James T Long <[email protected]> cc [email protected] Subject Re: Trying to boot with a RAMDISK Hi This step was pretty pointless... host > dd if=/dev/ram0 bs=1k count=8192 | gzip -v9 > ramdisk.gz the next thing you do is unpack it again. host > gunzip ramdisk.gz host > mount -o loop ramdisk mnt/ host > mkdir mnt/usr ; mkdir mnt/home ; mkdir mnt/home/jlong ; mkdir mnt/dev ; mkdir mnt/etc host > umount mnt You have no root filesystem merely usr home dev & etc directories. How exactly is the system supposed to boot as there are no executables! Can you try the ramdisk image that ships with the LSP. I forget exactly where it is located. Did you make sure the kernel understands ext2? Can you boot your kernel & check by looking for ext2 in the /proc/filesystems file. Regards Phil Q James T Long wrote: > > > Morning all, > > I am having trouble getting Linux (MonteVista 2.6.10) to boot. It's > failing to create a file-system. > My target board is a stand-alone DaVinci 6446, with only RS-232, > NAND-Flash, DDR-2 and Ethernet. > I can get Ethernet running while in U-Boot so I can load the kernel, > but Ethernet won't work > while Linux is trying to boot. (I had to disable the ethernet in > Linux, because DHCP would > timeout and fail.) > > I'm trying to create a RAMDISK, but Linux is rejecting it. See end of > page for the error message. > Please help on what I'm doing wrong. If there is a better strategy, > please let me know. > > Thank you for your help. > James Long > > > I've done the following, based mostly on Wiki pages. > > On my Linux PC, I modified menuconfig, like so, and then did a clean > build: > > CONFIG_MTD=y > CONFIG_MTD_PARTITIONS=y > > CONFIG_MTD_CHAR=y > CONFIG_MTD_BLKDEVS=y > CONFIG_MTD_BLOCK=y > > CONFIG_MTD_NAND=y > CONFIG_MTD_NAND_VERIFY_WRITE=y > CONFIG_MTD_NAND_IDS=y > CONFIG_MTD_NAND_DAVINCI=y > > CONFIG_YAFFS_FS=y > CONFIG_YAFFS_YAFFS1=y > CONFIG_YAFFS_YAFFS2=y > CONFIG_YAFFS_AUTO_YAFFS2=y > CONFIG_YAFFS_SHORT_NAMES_IN_RAM=y > > On my Linux PC, logged in as superuser, I created a 8Meg RAMDISK, like > so: > > host > cd /tftpboot > host > dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ram0 bs=1k count=8192 > host > mke2fs -vm0 /dev/ram0 8192 > host > tune2fs -c 0 /dev/ram0 > host > dd if=/dev/ram0 bs=1k count=8192 | gzip -v9 > ramdisk.gz > host > mkdir mnt > host > gunzip ramdisk.gz > host > mount -o loop ramdisk mnt/ > host > mkdir mnt/usr ; mkdir mnt/home ; mkdir mnt/home/jlong ; > mkdir mnt/dev ; mkdir mnt/etc > host > umount mnt > host > gzip -v9 ramdisk > > Then, from U-Boot, I load and burn the kernel and ramdisk.gz. > > UBOOT # dhcp 0x80700000 192.186.0.100:/tftpboot/uImage > UBOOT # nand erase 0x100000 0x150000 > UBOOT # nand write 0x80700000 0x100000 0x150000 > > UBOOT # tftp 0x87000000 ramdisk.gz > UBOOT # nand erase 0x280000 0x20000 > UBOOT # nand write 0x87000000 0x280000 0x20000 > > UBOOT # setenv bootcmd 'nand read 0x87000000 0x280000 0x20000; > nboot 80700000 0 100000; bootm' > UBOOT # setenv bootargs console=ttyS0,115200n8 root=/dev/ram0 rw > initrd=0x87000000,8M > ip=192.168.0.103:255.255.255.0:192.168.0.1:192.168.0.1:192.168.0.100:off > mem=120M > UBOOT # saveenv > > When I power-cycle, I get the following (On the second line, I added a > printf of the two magic numbers being compared): > > RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0 > EXT3-fs: Magic mismatch, very weird ! <00000000 0000ef53> > yaffs: dev is 1048576 name is "ram0" > yaffs: Attempting MTD mount on 1.0, "ram0" > yaffs: dev is 1048576 name is "ram0" > yaffs: Attempting MTD mount on 1.0, "ram0" > Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on > unknown-block(1,0) > >------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >_______________________________________________ >Davinci-linux-open-source mailing list >[email protected] >http://linux.davincidsp.com/mailman/listinfo/davinci-linux-open-source > >
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