Upgrading to a newer kernel version in Starkl

[bahadir]

Hi,

In default Starkl release (v1.0.3) the kernel version is 3.10.92 . For our specific needs we would need to upgrade to kernel version 4.6 (or at least to 4.1)

Do we have starkl builds with newer kernel versions already available? Or would it be too much of work if we ourselves tried to make kernel v 4.6 to work on the board?

Any pointers , SoC or board specific kernel patches etc. would be very much appreciated

Thanks

[Pete]

Hi,

We are working on the newer kernel, this however won't be in STARKL it will likely be in Raspbian, and we will have buildroot and poky solutions, this is currently work in progress.

Most can be found on the bitbucket repositories, and https://mathembedded.atlassian.net/wiki ... the+kernel

Cheers
Pete

[bahadir]

Thanks for the response Pete,

However I am not able to access to the repos from the wiki link. Will you be able to share the link for the bitbucket repos too?

Also do we have a ballpark estimate for the delivery of the newer kernel version and whether it's going to be version 4.6+ ?

As long as we have a working kernel source I can move it to STARKL myself so Raspian is also fine

Regards
BG

[MattMunro]

Hi,
The Bitbucket repositories are available at: https://bitbucket.org/4kopen/
Kind regards,
Matt

[Pete]

The specific kernel repo is at https://bitbucket.org/4kopen/linux/src/4kopen-bringup/

It's currently 4.16 but we have a v5.0 as well.

[Pete]

The 4.16 kernel I've pointed you to, will boot, what interfaces do you need support for?

The encoder for example works in the latest kernel, but the HDMIrx doesn't (neither does the decoders), but we could probably give you code to do decoding in the newer kernel, what we don't currently have (but is almost working) is the DRM driver to do the display. If you wanted to have a look at that it's on the drm-debug branch.

Starkl is not supported on the latest kernel.

[bahadir]

Thanks a lot, I will take a look at the repos.

The main interface I needed this was for a Wifi driver so pciE. HDMIrx will be needed too but that would be supported eventually I guess.

There are also other system level reasons we would like to use a newer kernel version too (like F2FS support being experimental in 3.10.92 kernel and such)

To be clear when you say "Starkl is not supported in the latest kernel" , isn't starkl a build system wrapped around buildroot? That was my understanding to be honest.

So in theory I should be able to move that 4.16 booting kernel code in my STARKL buildroot packages and build that as the kernel version right?

I was even planning to update the buildroot version under STARKL (it is 2017- 5 release) to make F2FS file system creation easier. I guess newer buildroot versions support F2FS as a rootfs option, so that would eliminate the need for a post-build script stage for me.

Please let me know if I got the STARKL bit wrong