[Openembedded-users] Porting OE to new hardware

[Radoslav Kolev]

On пн, 2010-03-29 at 07:59 +1000, Adam Nielsen wrote:
> > My question is this: Can someone give me the steps I must follow to boot
> > up an OE image on custom hardware.
> 
> Your message definitely arrived on this list (twice), but I'm in the same
> situation as you, and there doesn't seem to be anyone on this list who can
> help.  I think there is a developers list as well which you might have more
> luck on.

Hello guys, 

yes the openembedded-devel at lists.openembedded.org list sees much more
traffic and it seems like this one is almost never used.

As to answer the question the "image" generated is most probably the
root filesystem image. You don't want to start executing that directly.

What you need to load into memory and execute is the Linux kernel. The
file which contains it can be named uImage, zImage, vmlinux or something
else, depending on the compression and format used. It can be found
under the /boot dir of the rootfs image or under the kernel source tree
at  arch/YOUR_ARCH/boot

Of course, to have any success your kernel config and probably source
needs to be adapted to your custom hardware. At least things like which
UART to use for the console, what clock frequencies are used, etc.

Your bootloader must be aware of the kernel image type, know how to
extract it, where exactly to put it into memory and to start execution.
The most frequently used bootloader for platforms like yours is U-boot,
so may be you should have a look at it.

Once you've got the kernel booting successfully you need to supply it
with a root filesystem. At first it can be included as part of the
kernel image using initramfs and mounted from RAM disk or if you have
ethernet interface you can mount the rootfs via NFS. At last mounting
the rootfs from FLASH using the MTD subsystem and appropriate FS like
YAFFS/JFFS2/UbiFS is probably what you're looking for.

Regards,
Radoslav Kolev