April 10 – Bitbake and Xenomai

After the Xenomai image compiled using buildroot did not work, I decided to go back to the original place I had heard about Xenomai. This individual was able to compile the Linux kernel using OpenEmbedded and bitbake with a provided script and recipe. Building Image contains the information and files I used for building the image.

The process went pretty well,except at one point bitbake requires and enormous amount of resources. I had to increase the amount of memory available to my VM from 1GB to 1.5GB. Additionally there were a few packages that are currently out of date and need to be obtained from sources that are not the normal repositories. These are added to the /sources folder and the MD5 and SHA256 checksums needed updating for them in their respective recipes as well.

After the build I decided that instead of re-imaging the SD card with he new information, I overwrote the old information with the new to save time. The new installation worked and began a lengthy initial setup. After the setup was completed I was greeted by an Angstrom logo and a login for the board. Although pleased that the installation worked, there were a few problems withe the build. The key problems are that the USB drivers and the wireless drivers do not work. Apparently these drivers were not compiled into the kernel, or a module. Also because of a slightly newer kernel (2.6.35 vs 2.6.32) and the installation of Xenoami, the old drivers do not work.

I need to reconfigure the kernel and ensure that the modules will be compiled for the proper kernel version, then redo this image.

I also made sure to create an image of the “working” SD card so that in any case we will have a Xenomai kernel that works.