openbiosprog-spi tin stripping front © by Uwe Hermann

Today the guys from artecgroup told me my flexyICE was already dispatched. After 2 weeks trying to send money to Estonia this week I finally managed to finish it. I spent much more money than I wanted, but I believe it’s worth it. Now it’s time to wait till the package arrives here(the other side of the world).

Twitter Notebook © by bfishadow

This is a post just to tell that coreboot now has its own twitter account go just follow us there. Another reason for this post is to test a wordpress flickr plugin. It searches flickr photos as a media library an handles the copyright stuffs. I don’t know if the one I picked is the best one but at least it handles the law things

As stated in my midterm report I’m working this first 2 weeks after midterm to work on building the payload image. I wanted to hardcode everything but we(my mentor and I) understood it would be better to use something like OpenEmbedded for that.

This first week I studied OpenEmbedded. I tested many distributions starting with angstrom, they showed too heavy for our purpose. After those tests I found micro and realized it would be a better start.

With that I’m working around micro to build our own distro, I’m adding X11 dependencies and right now I’m packing the spice client and its dependencies. In the end of the week I must have sorted every details.

You may ask, “hey dorilex, why spend time on writing such a stupid script?” the answer is “I’m a lazy guy” – in fact I enjoy writing stuffs, but repeating commands isn’t that enjoyable. But to be true I work on several machines and now and then I get to set everything up

Many explanations hum? ok, if you want to use the sh you can check it out here;

/me vanish

What was done

My buildrom tree received some updates and small changes to the building system. The bigest problem to solve was make it build coreboot with the new [k]build system. For that I changed build rom to incorporate the coreboot options so the user can configure every aspects of coreboot – all from buildrom menus. 

For prototyping I used a chroot with a debian bootstrap(debootstrap), this surely doesn`t fit well to the project but I didn`t much attention for that, I thought I could leave it for second half – in the last days talking to my mentor I realized I should have paid more attention to the image things.

With a debootstrap I hacked I small script to package copy that root to my final image, what, once again, doesn`t fit our needs and requirements and here comes the tasks to be taken in the second half.

Second half

The project has been designed to be fully installed in/loaded from flash, It`s loaded with filo(but like discussed with my mentor any other bootload would fit prefectly).

Busybox will be our base system and a x-server. To acomplish that I have to take and finish the following tasks:

• design the building strategies which involves;
  • building the busybox(well, this one is already done once we have a busybox package in buildrom system – I just need to base on that);
  • select the needed x-server componentes(modules – Xlibs, Xprogs, Xvesa);
  • select the alsa packages;
  • include the spice client and its dependencies;
• define the kernel features;
• define how filo is about to load the final image;
• define the best compression algorithm;
• integrate the whole thing to buildrom;
• alix board support;

The base building scripts will be packaged separetely and then integrated to buildrom like the other packages(i.e busybox, filo, grub and so on).

There`re just 6 weeks to the final evaluation and I`m leaving the alix board support to the last 2 weeks.

The build scripts and kernel prototyping will take the 2 first weeks, while the third one I`ll be working to put everything to be built by buildrom, the system can be tested as a proper system from an iso image till I get to integrate it to buildrom and package it as a coreboot payload.

Now I’m waiting for my alix and flexyICE.

previous setup

current setup

Once buildrom has been unmaintained for quite some time now I`ll need to work around it before working on the spice bits.

Spice

Yeah! when I say spice I mean the remote and virtualized desktop protocol, originally developed by Qumranet now acquired by Red Hat.
The basic idea is to make a client run from a minimal environment. We`ll be working on a LAB(Linux as bootloader) solution.

Initial steps

As I said above, we need some work around buildrom system, the coreboot buildsystem has migrated to kbuild on the stable code and lots of things have changed with it.

Both buildrom and coreboot work with kbuild with that I`m writing a small python piece of code to parse coreboot`s Kconfig files and then arrange it into buildrom source code. I also need to 1) monitor the coreboot Kconfig files changes so I run the parser again and 2) change the coreboot build calls.

With all the kconfig arranged the buildrom user needs just to set the rom properties including the coreboot options(since those options are passed to coreboot build).

The kernel configs also need some attention it`s statically set for each board, I haven`t come with a better solution for this till now.

Hardware and new toys

I have ordered an ALIX.3D3, a flexyICE and a new desktop computer. The first 2 are comming from EU and will be dispatched later on May. The new desktop computer I get till the end of the week(before the gsoc bonding period end).

Now, let`s rock.

Perhaps you started configuring a third-party product built with rails, after sometime you discovered you’ve configured everything and now want to set it up for production environment but, you played initially with sqlite and your production environment runs with mysql. Well you got the idea.

The idea is to use yaml_db, dump from production, configure you test profile env. and load it into. yaml_db is simple plugin, it’s git repo is here: git://github.com/adamwiggins/yaml_db.git

Dumping:

rake db:dump RAILS_ENV=production

Loading:

rake db:load RAILS_ENV=test

Here you find a tutorial teaching step-by-step.

It`s a web application mostly written in java(j2ee old things). We used to configure and build it with a collection of ant scripts. With some migrations in mind I realized I should start by migrating the whole thing to a different build platform, and maven seemed to be the best option.

Well, after some tests and 2 new extra plugins written I finally completed the so desired task, now It`s time to manage the next migrations to make our life better.

PS: besides the development and team leading I do manage a big range of servers.