Re: Porting OpenBSD to OLPC XO laptops.
[diverted to [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Wed, Sep 26, 2007 at 08:08:41AM -0700, big one wrote: | OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) had released XO AMD Geode LX Laptops | using G1G1 (Buy 2 Get 1). One laptop will be sent to the buyer and the | 2nd laptop will be sent to a child in a poor, developing country. | | According to Mr Theo de Raadt from OpenBSD, it is impossible to | write device driver for Wireless chipset inside XO. | | According to OLPC developer team: | 1. There is no standard BIOS inside XO laptops. | 2. There is no VGA/EGA/CGA video mode. | | Is it possible to port OpenBSD to XO Laptops without | activating/using the wireless chipset? | Thank you Why not buy some and send them to interested developers. Buy 2 Send 1 to an OpenBSD developer ;) Cheers, Paul 'WEiRD' de Weerd -- [++-]+++.+++[---].+++[+ +++-].++[-]+.--.[-] http://www.weirdnet.nl/
Re: Porting OpenBSD to OLPC XO laptops.
Maybe I've missed something but what makes it impossible to write a device driver for the Wireless chipset? -Josh On 9/26/07, Paul de Weerd [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [diverted to [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Wed, Sep 26, 2007 at 08:08:41AM -0700, big one wrote: | OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) had released XO AMD Geode LX Laptops | using G1G1 (Buy 2 Get 1). One laptop will be sent to the buyer and the | 2nd laptop will be sent to a child in a poor, developing country. | | According to Mr Theo de Raadt from OpenBSD, it is impossible to | write device driver for Wireless chipset inside XO. | | According to OLPC developer team: | 1. There is no standard BIOS inside XO laptops. | 2. There is no VGA/EGA/CGA video mode. | | Is it possible to port OpenBSD to XO Laptops without | activating/using the wireless chipset? | Thank you Why not buy some and send them to interested developers. Buy 2 Send 1 to an OpenBSD developer ;) Cheers, Paul 'WEiRD' de Weerd -- [++-]+++.+++[---].+++[+ +++-].++[-]+.--.[-] http://www.weirdnet.nl/
Re: Porting OpenBSD to OLPC XO laptops.
On 26/09/2007, Paul de Weerd [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [diverted to [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Wed, Sep 26, 2007 at 08:08:41AM -0700, big one wrote: | OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) had released XO AMD Geode LX Laptops | using G1G1 (Buy 2 Get 1). One laptop will be sent to the buyer and the | 2nd laptop will be sent to a child in a poor, developing country. | | According to Mr Theo de Raadt from OpenBSD, it is impossible to | write device driver for Wireless chipset inside XO. | | According to OLPC developer team: | 1. There is no standard BIOS inside XO laptops. | 2. There is no VGA/EGA/CGA video mode. | | Is it possible to port OpenBSD to XO Laptops without | activating/using the wireless chipset? | Thank you Why not buy some and send them to interested developers. Buy 2 Send 1 to an OpenBSD developer ;) You'd have to buy at least a total of four laptops then. :) It is no less interesting to note that the price is obviously 2 times more what it was supposed to be. One more thing that deserves attention is that the OLPC camp promised us all that by the time the laptop goes into mass production, all parts of the system will be free, including the wireless module -- but is it indeed so? C.
Re: Porting OpenBSD to OLPC XO laptops.
On 2007/09/26 13:58, Joshua Smith wrote: Maybe I've missed something but what makes it impossible to write a device driver for the Wireless chipset? not impossible, but I think it was fiddly. it's malo(4), isn't it? there's the usual silly games with firmware files too, you need to get them onto the system by some other method (wired, USB, type in a printed uuencode, or whatever).
Re: Porting OpenBSD to OLPC XO laptops.
On 26/09/2007, Joshua Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Maybe I've missed something but what makes it impossible to write a device driver for the Wireless chipset? Nothing is impossible, but the problem is that so many parts of the OLPC hardware are proprietary and without readily available documentation that the work would be very difficult and time consuming. Looks can be deceiving, too: this version of the laptop appears to be targeted to 18+ users, because in many jurisdictions you have to be at least 18 to sign an NDA in order to actually explore the hardware part of the laptop. C.
Re: Porting OpenBSD to OLPC XO laptops.
Paul de Weerd [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [diverted to [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Wed, Sep 26, 2007 at 08:08:41AM -0700, big one wrote: | OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) had released XO AMD Geode LX Laptops | using G1G1 (Buy 2 Get 1). One laptop will be sent to the buyer and the | 2nd laptop will be sent to a child in a poor, developing country. | | According to Mr Theo de Raadt from OpenBSD, it is impossible to | write device driver for Wireless chipset inside XO. | | According to OLPC developer team: | 1. There is no standard BIOS inside XO laptops. | 2. There is no VGA/EGA/CGA video mode. | | Is it possible to port OpenBSD to XO Laptops without | activating/using the wireless chipset? | Thank you Why not buy some and send them to interested developers. Buy 2 Send 1 to an OpenBSD developer ;) Last week I borrowed a pre-production B2 model from a friendly OLPC developer. It's true the hardware is more like some embedded appliance than 'normal' i386. Moreover, it uses Open Firmware and not a BIOS. You can probably find this information and more on the OLPC wikis but here are dmesg and lspci for the curious. But keep in mind this is a pre-production model and the hardware in the production models is beefed up. (And no, I'm currently too much of a slacker getting it working with OpenBSD) 00:01.0 Host bridge: National Semiconductor Corporation Geode GX2 Host Bridge (rev 21) 00:01.1 VGA compatible controller: National Semiconductor Corporation Geode GX2 Graphics Processor 00:0c.0 FLASH memory: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. Unknown device 4100 (rev 10) 00:0c.1 Generic system peripheral [0805]: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. Unknown device 4101 (rev 10) 00:0c.2 Multimedia video controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. Unknown device 4102 (rev 10) 00:0f.0 ISA bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] CS5536 [Geode companion] ISA (rev 03) 00:0f.3 Multimedia audio controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] CS5536 [Geode companion] Audio (rev 01) 00:0f.4 USB Controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] CS5536 [Geode companion] OHC (rev 02) 00:0f.5 USB Controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] CS5536 [Geode companion] EHC (rev 02) [0.00] Linux version 2.6.22-20070910.30.olpc.25d22c40e3bef15 ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) (gcc version 4.1.1 20070105 (Red Hat 4.1.1-51)) #1 PREEMPT Mon Sep 10 03:09:19 EDT 2007 [0.00] BIOS-provided physical RAM map: [0.00] BIOS-e801: - 0009f000 (usable) [0.00] BIOS-e801: 0010 - 075dd000 (usable) [0.00] 117MB LOWMEM available. [0.00] Entering add_active_range(0, 0, 30173) 0 entries of 256 used [0.00] Zone PFN ranges: [0.00] DMA 0 - 4096 [0.00] Normal 4096 -30173 [0.00] early_node_map[1] active PFN ranges [0.00] 0:0 -30173 [0.00] On node 0 totalpages: 30173 [0.00] DMA zone: 32 pages used for memmap [0.00] DMA zone: 0 pages reserved [0.00] DMA zone: 4064 pages, LIFO batch:0 [0.00] Normal zone: 203 pages used for memmap [0.00] Normal zone: 25874 pages, LIFO batch:7 [0.00] DMI not present or invalid. [0.00] Allocating PCI resources starting at 1000 (gap: 075dd000:f8a23000) [0.00] Built 1 zonelists. Total pages: 29938 [0.00] Kernel command line: ro root=mtd0 rootfstype=jffs2 console=ttyS0,115200 console=tty0 fbcon=font:SUN12x22 [0.00] Initializing CPU#0 [0.00] CPU 0 irqstacks, hard=c074a000 soft=c0749000 [0.00] PID hash table entries: 512 (order: 9, 2048 bytes) [0.00] Detected 362.994 MHz processor. [ 13.994339] Console: colour EGA 80x25 [ 13.995511] Dentry cache hash table entries: 16384 (order: 4, 65536 bytes) [ 13.996123] Inode-cache hash table entries: 8192 (order: 3, 32768 bytes) [ 14.022039] Memory: 106348k/120692k available (2325k kernel code, 13804k reserved, 842k data, 168k init, 0k highmem) [ 14.00] virtual kernel memory layout: [ 14.022234] fixmap : 0xd000 - 0xf000 ( 8 kB) [ 14.022251] vmalloc : 0xc800 - 0xb000 ( 895 MB) [ 14.022267] lowmem : 0xc000 - 0xc75dd000 ( 117 MB) [ 14.022284] .init : 0xc071a000 - 0xc0744000 ( 168 kB) [ 14.022301] .data : 0xc06455e9 - 0xc07181b4 ( 842 kB) [ 14.022318] .text : 0xc040 - 0xc06455e9 (2325 kB) [ 14.022777] Checking if this processor honours the WP bit even in supervisor mode... Ok. [ 14.174046] Calibrating delay using timer specific routine.. 727.64 BogoMIPS (lpj=3638233) [ 14.174543] Security Framework v1.0.0 initialized [ 14.174651] SELinux: Initializing. [ 14.174857] SELinux: Starting in permissive mode [ 14.174904] selinux_register_security: Registering secondary module capability [ 14.175015] Capability LSM initialized as secondary [ 14.175269] Mount-cache hash table entries: 512 [ 14.176363] CPU: After
Re: Porting OpenBSD to OLPC XO laptops.
On Sep 26, 2007, at 5:08 PM, big one wrote: OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) had released XO AMD Geode LX Laptops using G1G1 (Buy 2 Get 1). One laptop will be sent to the buyer and the 2nd laptop will be sent to a child in a poor, developing country. According to Mr Theo de Raadt from OpenBSD, it is impossible to write device driver for Wireless chipset inside XO. According to OLPC developer team: 1. There is no standard BIOS inside XO laptops. 2. There is no VGA/EGA/CGA video mode. Is it possible to port OpenBSD to XO Laptops without activating/ using the wireless chipset? Thank you The XO laptop looks like a great little laptop to use without the nice looking but weird SUGAR interface. I was actually hoping to buy one to use with OpenBSD. I didn't think any part of the laptop would be closed. From http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Core_principles/lang-en .. There is no inherent external dependency in being able to localize software into their language, fix the software to remove bugs, and repurpose the software to fit their needs. Nor is there any restriction in regard to redistribution; OLPC cannot know and should not control how the tools we create will be re-purposed in the future. ... Further, every child has something to contribute; we need a free and open framework that supports and encourages the very basic human need to express. Give me a free and open environment and I will learn and teach with joy. Proprietary hardware and software seems to be directly against their core principles. The XO laptop uses Open Firmware instead of a BIOS, so it's probably a lot like a Sun SPARC or a PPC Mac. Can you point me to the source where Theo de Raadt claims that it's impossible to write a driver for the Marvell Libertas controller (wireless networking). I can't seem to find it. Thanks, Floor Terra
Re: Porting OpenBSD to OLPC XO laptops.
On Wed, Sep 26, 2007 at 01:58:16PM -0400, Joshua Smith wrote: Maybe I've missed something but what makes it impossible to write a device driver for the Wireless chipset? -Josh No one said it is impossible, it is just far harder than it should be due to a lack of documentation and companies like Red Hat signing NDAs with Marvell. The specific chip the OLPC people are using thus far does not seem to be found anywhere else in the market. Combine that with a quirky non standard machine with limited availability and you see why people aren't terribly interested.
