[J-core] Port Idea: Little Kernel

[Rob Landley]

On 11/12/2017 04:05 AM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> 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).

The work Cedric is doing on his qemu fork is quite interesting, if we
can convert landisk to device tree and get that tree to cedric for
reference, he might be able to get qemu to emulate it.

A board with more than 64 megs of ram and a single hard drive would be
nice. (And a battery backed up clock.)

And, of course, teaching QEMU to emulate the serial buffer the kernel's
expected it to have for a year now. :)

> 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

Paul Mundt was not acting in the best interests of the Linux kernel.

> 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!

If Rich doesn't find time by about February, poke me. (I'm in Tokyo this
month, then relatives for the holidays, then catching up from all that...)

Can these be ordered on amazon, or only bought personally in taiwan?

Thanks,

Rob