Official Guide to compile a kernel for Parallella

[jimmystone]

Dear all,

Is there an official guide talk about how to compile Ubuntu kernel for Parallella?

[e97]

Download kernel from git

Native compile on parallella:

1. make paralella_defconfig

a. If you want to make changes to the kernel config: make menuconfig

2. make -j2 (-V s for verbose output)

3. make modules

4. make modules_install

If you are cross compiling, it will mostly be the same but you will need to have and specify a CROSS_COMPILE toolchain as well as target ARCH.

[frankbuss]

Minor mistake, first step is "make parallella_defconfig" (note the additional L). Also for "make menuconfig", you need to install ncurses first: "sudo apt-get install libncurses-dev", if you want to compile it native on the platform from the latest Parabuntu release (2016.11 as of writing this). Also worth noting that the git repository is located at https://github.com/parallella/parallella-linux and that the branch is "parallella-linux-2016.11". No need to patch anything, the manual at http://www.adapteva.com/white-papers/bu ... -platform/ is outdated and should be deleted or changed to avoid confusion.

After this you don't have uImage. So another step is required:

5. make LOADADDR=0x8000 uImage

The uImage file is then located in "arch/arm/boot" and can be copied to /boot. Note that in the last official Parabuntu release, the boot partition is not mounted on start and you have to do this manually, or add it to /etc/fstab as I did (with the line "/dev/mmcblk0p1 /boot vfat defaults 0 0") and reboot.

And it is very useful to have a bigger filesystem, which can be done by deleting and creating the partition on the SD card first, to change it to a bigger partition, then using resize2fs. All from a host system. Might be possible from the platform itself, too, at least the Raspberry Pi can do this and it is just a simple option in their ncurses config program, without the need to do it all manually. But for the Linux kernel sources etc., you might want to store this on your host anyway, because SD cards can wear out or get damaged pretty fast. I use sshfs to mount a directory on my PC from the Parallella.

I just tried this on the Parallella device, with a network mounted filesystem and it needed several hours. Cross compiling on a PC with a local filesystem is much faster.

Maybe an official guide on the parallella.org page would be useful instead of just linking to the github repository? Or at least add it to the github repository readme file?

[frankbuss]

[frankbuss]