Recent Poky changes

During last days I spent time on adding ARMv6 related stuff into Poky.

First problem was lack of ARMv6 support in QEmu which we use to generate binary locales (you need at least 128M of RAM to get localedef working on device). All information which I found in net was info from Paul Brook that he has ARMv6/v7 emulation working but can not release it due to license of ARM documentation.

But finally he got signed permission to show code to the world and QEmu got ARMv6/v7 support. Refreshing all our patches took some time for me and Richard ‘RP’ Purdie but finally we got it working. Binary locales for ARMv4t and ARMv5te worked but not for ARMv6 ;( The solution was quite simple — adding “—cpu arm1136” into qemu-arm invocation. As a result I added new variable into “bitbake.conf” — QEMU_OPTIONS which set proper “—cpu” value.

So now, when we have binary locales working for all our devices the next change was possibility to generate only UTF-8 locales (does someone use other ones?). Change was quite simple and that is how “LOCALE_UTF8_ONLY” variable was born.

Now I have other thing to solve — get “qemuarm” (our ARM emulation machine) working with ARMv6 rootfs (I have to test it on something — all my ARM devices are ARMv4/v4t or v5te only). There is “RealView” emulation in QEmu which handle it but it lack many features so I have to rather try to get “VersatilePB” working with ARMv6. I just hope that messing with Linux kernel sources will not be too hard to get it working…

linux openembedded poky qemu