The content of this page is provided as is in the hope it will be useful but with no guarantee you will not break your device. You have been warned!
A changelog is available at the bottom of the page to follow the progress.
State of the art for Nokia N900: the device is (still) delivered with a 2.6.28-omap kernel. Some time ago, I did some work in order to switch to a 2.6.28.10-omap1-grsec, which my N900 now runs.
Upstream: Meanwhile, new kernel versions have been released, providing new features and fixing additional security issues. Additionally, official grsecurity/PaX support on ARM has been announced.
What can be done?: I decided to take a look at what is needed (what is missing) in order to get the N900 run current linux-omap kernel. If things go well, this would allow running a recent grsecurity-patched kernel.
This page and you: This page documents the work and associated results, with the hope that it will be useful to others and/or others can help. For instance, if you are familiar with some specific OMAP 3430 features (e.g. GPU, ...), N900 hardware features (e.g. CMT, ...) or a kernel subsytem (e.g. V4L2, ...) and you can help porting/debugging some of the patches discussed below to run on current kernel, your help is welcome.
Work already done: I started working on the HUGE (380000 Lines) patch provided by Nokia for the 2.6.28 (kernel_2.6.28-20100903+0m5-orig.diff) in order to see what additional code had been added to support the hardware and required features (power consumption, ...). I compared that with the content of current l-o tree, extracted single fonctionalities and created updated patches to apply on top of current l-o kernel (pm branch). After some struggle, I got some results. Note that additional work is still needed on what remains from the extraction. Keep reading.
How you can start playing with the patches: All the patches I have (those which apply on top of current l-o pm branch and what remains of Nokia 2.6.28 diff) are provided as a quilt set versioned using mercurial. It contains a series file where you can find useful information and a dot-config file you can use as a .config to build a working kernel. See below for a practical example.
Note that git, quilt and mercurial are part of my current workflow but I am open to other things if I get some company on the subject.
Here is how you can start (i make the assumption that you are familiar with git and the steps needed to compile and install a custom kernel for you N900).
Grab (or update) a copy of linux-omap tree and checkout a local branch following remote pm one:
$ git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tmlind/linux-omap-2.6.git $ git checkout -b pm origin/pm $ git log commit 721ef8f0c2a6a0406307f0ac5fee9a4aed6ed2c3 Merge: 16bed77 e4a0eef Author: Kevin Hilman <khilman@deeprootsystems.com> Date: Thu Apr 8 10:33:50 2010 -0700 rebuild PM from branches ...
Clone the quilt set of patches and apply them
$ hg clone http://hg.natisbad.org/N900/n900-upstream-omap-patches patches destination directory: patches requesting all changes adding changesets adding manifests adding file changes added 1 changesets with 103 changes to 103 files updating to branch default 103 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved $ quilt push -a Applying patch disabled_cpufreq_compilation_workaround.patch patching file arch/arm/mach-omap2/clock.c patching file arch/arm/mach-omap2/clock3xxx_data.c Applying patch boottag.patch patching file arch/arm/plat-omap/Kconfig patching file arch/arm/plat-omap/common.c patching file arch/arm/include/asm/setup.h Applying patch bootreason.patch patching file arch/arm/plat-omap/bootreason.c patching file arch/arm/plat-omap/Kconfig patching file arch/arm/plat-omap/Makefile ... Applying patch twl4030-vibra.patch patching file drivers/leds/Kconfig patching file drivers/leds/Makefile patching file drivers/leds/leds-twl4030-vibra.c Now at patch twl4030-vibra.patch
Copy provided dot-config file as .config and compile the kernel.
$ cp n900-upstream-omap-patches/dot-config .config $ arm-linux-gnueabi-gcc --version arm-linux-gnueabi-gcc (Debian 4.3.2-1.1) 4.3.2 Copyright (C) 2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. $ ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabi- make
You do not really need to copy any kernel module on the device before flashing the new kernel. Before doing the following, you should read the content of /sbin/preinit file on the device to understand it and modify it (e.g. call start_shell, use tty0) in order to be sure to get a shell executed at startup. I will try and document all the details in the future in a section on this page.
$ sudo flasher-3.5 -k arch/arm/boot/zImage -f -R
After the device has rebooted, you get access to a shell. Because hardware watchdogs are enabled by default, the device will stop after 30 seconds. Roger Quadros provided a workaround on l-o ML (here). To disable the hardware watchdogs (this should prevent any unexpected reset) via flasher:
$ sudo flasher --set-rd-flags=no-omap-wd,no-ext-wd,no-lifeguard-reset
In order to restore all factory settings, do
$ sudo flasher --disable-rd-mode
Another way (the good one I guess while we manage to get further in the boot process) to deal with the watchdogs is to use a userland daemon as explained here.
Things that work: not meaning that code is ready for prime time or bug-free. list is not meant to be exhaustive.
- Panel (using code pushed upstream by Roger Quadros)
- Accelerometers
- Keyboard backlight
- Ambient Light Sensor
- Temperature sensor
- Led
- ...
Things needing additional work, i.e. on which you can help:
- GPU/ISP code from TI (see ti-isp-support.patch and gpu-pvr.patch, i.e. those 66000 lines babies)
- SSI MacSAAB and associated features to interface with the phone stack
- Camera and V4L2 code
- 802.11 code
- ...
- 18/04/10:
- first pass on Nokia kernel_2.6.28-20100903+0m5.diff to (get an idea of the size of the mountain and) understand what is missing in current l-o tree.
- Various patches updated.
- N900 boots a patched current (2.6.34-rc3 based) linux-omap kernel (pm branch) on console (no X).
- Some hardware components and features supported.
- This page put online!