Snowball not supported by flash-kernel

[Nikolay Nikolaev]

Attached is a patch to support the ST-Ericsson Snowball.
I have reused the i.MX udpate function and enhanced it allow customization of the boot.scr generation.

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

The attachment "ST-Ericsson Snowball support patch" of this bug report has been identified as being a patch. The ubuntu-reviewers team has been subscribed to the bug report so that they can review the patch. In the event that this is in fact not a patch you can resolve this situation by removing the tag 'patch' from the bug report and editing the attachment so that it is not flagged as a patch. Additionally, if you are member of the ubuntu-reviewers team please also unsubscribe the team from this bug report.

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[Kalle Vahlman (kvahlman)]

Couple of observations:

flash-kernel requires uboot-mkimage installed for most of it's targets but does not depend on it (only suggests). I'm not sure if that makes sense. But this is a generic issue.

Another issue is that the flash-kernel.conf will contain the wrong partition when on eMMC. This is because Snowball eMMC images contain a special partition that the boot rom requires, and this shows up as mmcblock0p1 which is the default boot device for linaro-media-create. It should be changed to p2 which is the FAT partition with the boot scripts and kernel.

Doing the above plus applying the patch to flash-kernel (2.28ubuntu34linaro2) makes kernel flashing work for snowball.

So what we need is to study how to make l-m-c create a flash-kernel.conf with the correct boot partition, integrate this patch and somehow make sure that uboot-mkimage is installed by default on the images. Then we should be good to go with deploying kernel updates through apt-get install (kernel packaging contains a flash-image hook).

[Loïc Minier (lool)]

On Tue, Feb 21, 2012, Kalle Vahlman wrote:
> flash-kernel requires uboot-mkimage installed for most of it's targets
> but does not depend on it (only suggests). I'm not sure if that makes
> sense. But this is a generic issue.

 This is intentional; there are weak dependencies on u-boot-tools and
 other similar utilities: Suggests: u-boot-tools | uboot-mkimage,
 uboot-envtools, redboot-tools, abootimg

 mkimage should be pulled by whatever is installing flash-kernel to make
 the system bootable; flash-kernel provides a d-i style installer script
 to achieve this (see flash-kernel-installer.postinst in the source)
 which is called by d-i and ubiquity during e.g. Ubuntu installs. It's
 not clear how this should be integrated with Linaro image tools.

--
Loïc Minier

[Anmar Oueja (anmar)]

Kalle: Can you update the name of the bug. What is not-supported?

[Balint Reczey (rbalint)]

It looks like the platform's support ended and there seems to be little use of adding it now. :-(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_(single-board_computer)

[Nikolay Nikolaev (n.nikolaev)]

Snowball is long gone now. This one needs to be closed.