[J-core] Port Idea: Little Kernel

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

Hi Rich!

On 11/12/2017 03:11 AM, Rich Felker wrote:
> Hi. I'm sorry for the state of things there. Between personal things
> (esp. major smoke damage from house fire and being displaced for half
> the year), other work that has had to take priority with the project's
> sponsor

Ok, thanks for the update.

> and being blocked on lack of information to make progress on
> kernel stuff that's not J2-specific (I still don't have intructions on
> how to install a bootable kernel for the LANDISK, just a premade disk
> image, and I need to check if it even still works after getting
> bombarded with smoke)

Let me know if you need a new LANDISK device. I still have plenty of
them lying around. I also can tell you how to build your own kernel
for the thing and get it to boot. However, I still have the problem
that I don't know how to make the IDE driver work. I can get the
LANDISK to boot my own, freshly compiled kernel. But it will never
detect any IDE devices. But this might be a problem specific to the
LANDISK USL-5P devices I have. I never tested it with my HDL-U160
device (the same device I had sent to you from Japan).

I could also send you a NextVOD device of which I also have plenty
of. The NextVOD is a Video-on-Demand device from Taiwan which is
based on the ST40 SoC which has an SH4 core clocked at 450 MHz, 256
MiB RAM and uses u-boot, see:

> https://ftp.yzu.edu.tw/Linux/debian-sh4-for-nextvod/2013TWMiniDebConf/#/

Since the device uses u-boot, it's actually pretty easy to get your
own Linux kernel to boot on this device. And since it's reasonably fast,
it's also more fun to use as compared to the LANDISK device.

However, there is one huge drawback which is that support for ST40
was completely removed from the kernel, so it would need to be
re-added first:

> https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=f96691872439ab2071171d4531c4a95b5d493ae5

There is an out-of-tree kernel patch for the NextVoD but that is
still based on 2.6.32:

> https://github.com/dlintw/nextvod-tdt

If you (or anyone else) is interested on working on this and gettiing
the NextVoD working with a current kernel again, I would them send
such a NextVoD for free immediately. I would be very interested in
getting the NextVoDs supported by a current kernel again as those
NextVoDs devices can be acquired in Taiwan for less than US$10!

> it's been hard to accomplish much as kernel
> maintainer this year. But I am still here and haven't forgotten about
> things. If you have specific pressing matters you'd like me to look
> at, let me know.

I think it would be important to make sure that the patches which get
send from other maintainers to the linux-sh mailing would get merged
so that they don't fall into oblivion.

> https://marc.info/?l=linux-sh&m=151016437411723&w=2
> https://marc.info/?l=linux-sh&m=150964451522739&w=2

There are more patches that were submitted in October and the months
before.

Thanks,
Adrian

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz at debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz at physik.fu-berlin.de
  `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913