My current assignement is evaluating the use of a new CPU board on our hardware. This evolve rebuilding a kernel and booting with it. The board is a Motorola PrPMC1100, based on Intel Xcale CPU. I fetched a tree from Montavista that supports it and build arm-linux- cross-compiler with Debian. So far it works and the kernel boots. That was not painless as I have to reflash the board to get a RedBoot with proper support of the integrated NIC given that I boot over TFTP.... (and transfering that bootstrap image over XModem was a PITA).
booting it...
Booting is OK, but having a root filesystem is not. It looks like IDE support is broken (no flash) and the onboard NIC require a custom driver from Intel to work on Linux. And it weight 2MB by itself, and for that reason needs to be loaded as a module....
But that is not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that almost any ARM distribution, including our choice, Debian, provide ARM as Little-Endian. But this board requires BigEndian kernels. Guess what ? The Kernel (2.4.19) just replied "init not found." and did NOT display any error code (adding a few printk() helped me to find out that this was the problem). I will need to rebuild a BigEndian userland for Linux. Not fun at all.
Found some time to fix the clipping at last. Still lot of pixel dirt in scrolling, but at least drawing is OK. Code has not been committed because it was during the tree closing for 1.99.4 release (not on MacOS X). As usual I wasted more time building the whole beast the actually fixing the bug. I would like to thank Apple for creating a so SLOW operating system.
Life
Watched Antitrust for the first time (bought the DVD for EUR 5). I like the end credits.