[Ltib] Postmortem of bringing up Cirrus ARM on ltib and a couple of questions

[Mr Junk]

Stuart, et al,

I hope my efforts provide some insight for others that may face  
similar challenges.

While sorting most the the steps below (running ltib hundreds, maybe  
thousands of times, tftping and nfsing, writing sd cards, etc) I had a  
fever of 103.5 for almost 4 days and 102.3 for another 4.  Not the  
best state to be in while attempting to bring up a new BSP on LTIB.   
Alt least I had something to distract me from the immense pain that  
went with the virus.

The entire first set of problems came from trying to use the cirrus  
"4.1.1-920t" toolchain.  I really wanted to use that one.

Turns out the layout of that toolchain (although newer) would just not  
work with ltib, no way.

I tried for days. but in the end had to give up and let that one go.

The symptom was a system where dynamically linked programs failed to  
run.  Even rcS wouldn't run.

I keyed on to it when I statically linked all the packages and  
suddenly things looked better.  I realized that none of the libs were  
being copied over to my rootfs from the toolchain.

Then Stuart gave me an old base_libs.spec he had used with cirrus in  
the past.  After trying that with the toolchain and having no success  
I gave up and moved back to a 3.4.1 toolchain that I had found for the  
ep9302.

I was getting closer.  I made a single change in Stuart's specfile to  
extend a lib search one step deeper into the hierarchy, and viola,  
suddenly the libs where now showing up in my rootfs.

Still no love on rcS executing, but the system would at lease come up  
to the login.

I logged in and typed bash and lo behold things were suddenly working  
better.  Now I could manually run rcS from the command line.

After lots of experimenting I found that sash had been enable in the  
packages and it was pre-empting both ash and bash from being used to  
start the system up.  It didn't seem to have the proper permissions to  
run rcS and it's minions.

Turning off sash and linking sh to bash suddenly made the system work  
properly.  As well, busybox's ash also worked properly.

Now on to some packages.

Several key packages wouldn't compile and I found that fd.h from the  
toolchain had a bug. . .I removed __user from the offending line and  
all the packages wourld now compile, except a biggy.

gdb compiles most of the way through and then just stops while trying  
to generate some docs.

When I figure that on out I will let you know.


Questions:

I have been looking for gcc as a package and can't seem to find it.  I  
remember two years ago while working with the 8349 and ltib there was  
a gcc package.

The reason I need it (unless someone enlightens me) is that I need to  
build perl dbi for mysql.  First you run perl on the makefile and then  
you need to compile with gcc.

I'm not sure there is a way to do that in a cross compile environment.

If anyone has built DBD DBI for mysql and would put forth I would be  
eternally grateful.

There is still a bit I need to learn an I'm hoping there are docs  
somewhere that can help.

Stuart had mentioned how to add an alternate spec file for the  
base_libs by messing with the pkg_map in the config/platform area for  
the board, but it's now clear how to do that and how that is used to  
make the change when you run ltib.

If anyone knows where the docs on doing that are located I would also  
be very grateful.

Now that I have things running well I'm quite afraid to make changes  
that could bring it all down again.

I hope someone might find some of this useful in a similar situation.

Best,
ml