BuildingImage

My Build system

I am running a VM-ware player image with Gentoo Linux placed on a USB hostpowered disc. This does not give highest possible performance, but it allows for a lot of mobility and portability. Peripherals like a (micro)SD-card reader adapter for USB works fine, but the built-in one in my laptop is not available within the VM-ware player.

On my Gentoo linux I set-up the build environment according to the instructions for the overo build system.

The reason for choosing the open-embedded as for Overo is that the Verdex buildsystem has not been updated for approx. a year now and I wanted the latest recipes to get e.g. Open JDK.

Building an Rootfs image and a kernel

First I checked out a copy of (instructions) the Verdex build system. So the home directory now has:

~/gumstix/gusmtix-oe/
~/overo-oe/

Then, I copied the Verdex image recipes to the user.collection.

mkdir -p ~/overo-oe/user.collection/images/
cp ~/gumstix/gumstix-oe/com.gumstix.collection/packages/images/* ~/overo-oe/user.collection/images/

Once copied, I ran:

bitbake gumstix-basic-image

Resulting in a failure and Bitbake reporting that nothing provides some package and exited without building anything. I then copied the recipes for those packages and ran bitbake again. At the end I had copied:

task-base-gumstix
motd
uisp
version
www-content

Gumstix-kernel and sumversion.c

The Gumstix-kernel recipe fails with the error message

warning: unused variable 'filelist'

The problem can be solved by adding '#include <limits.h>' after strings.h in scripts/mod/sumversion.c fixes the issue. The file is found at: ~/overo-oe/tmp/work/gumstix-verdex-angstrom-linux-gnueabi/gumstix-kernel-2.6.21-r0/linux-2.6.21/scripts/mod/sumversion.c

#include <netinet/in.h>
#ifdef __sun__
#include <inttypes.h>
#else
#include <stdint.h>
#endif
#include <ctype.h>
#include <errno.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <limits.h>        <--- add this line
#include "modpost.h"

/*
 * Stolen form Cryptographic API.
 *
 * MD4 Message Digest Algorithm (RFC1320).

Problems with No GNU_HASH fount in elf

Baking the gumstix-basic-image the process stopped with the I2C package and the log information boiled down to the error message: No GNU_HASH fount in elf for the i2c.

ERROR: QA Issue: No GNU_HASH in the elf binary: '/home/<user>/overo-oe/tmp/work/armv5te-angstrom-linux-gnueabi/i2c-1.0-r2/install/i2c/usr/bin/i2c'

Asking for hints in the gumstix.users mailing list helped alot. Thanks Koen and Philip (archive here) and I could find the problem in the i2c.bb file: The task do_compile ignored the LDFLAGS set by the oe/autoconf tools.

do_compile () {
       ${CC} -o i2c *.c
}

Adding ${LDFLAGS} to the line for compiling solved this problem:

do_compile () {
       ${CC} -o i2c *.c ${LDFLAGS}
}

Then the same problem emerged in the pxaregs recipes and the same solution applied. This resulted in a completed bake.

Booting the gumstix from a micro SD card

Currently, I boot the gumstix from a 2GB micro SD card. NOTE that 4GB SDHC does work to boot from. If booting from flash, the card is found and read/write works fine even with 4GB. Probably the U-boot version does not support SDHC cards. These instructions for setting up the MicroSD card works fine for me. Don't forget to enable the MMC_ROOT by uncommenting the line in the ~/gumstix/gumstix-oe/com.gumstix.collection/conf/machine/gumstix-custom-verdex.conf

MACHINE_FEATURES += "mmcroot"