I wanted to check whether anyone has already played with the linux-xlnx kernel on the Parallella. I believe it might give me a short route to since there is a kernel driver, and a 3rd party driver has been written and reportedly works on the Zedboard.
So, has anyone attempted to get this kernel running on the Parallella?
I have no knowledge of the differences between Zedboard and Parallella (other than lack of Epiphany) - but I hope the proposed approach means I'm not going to toast anything through ignorant hacking. Can anyone who is knowledgeable about the differences between the Zedboard and the Parallella comment?
I have no interest in HDMI (is this the only reason Parallella are using the ADI kernel in particular and not mainline?), as I have only used my Parallella headless and have no HDMI cables to my name. I do not need access to the Epiphany - this is a temporary runup to experiment with AXI DMA. If the results are pleasing, and nobody suggests a better approach, I might then look to porting it to the parallella kernel.
I will be simply using my own bitstream based on the Parallella - so not using one from a zedboard or anything weird like that. I'll revert to a stock Ubuntu rootfs, as I know to run ArchLinux (my favored rootfs), some kernel config changes were required. I'd rather avoid any potential issues there for now.
I expect the process will look something like:
1) Build linux-xlnx kernel using zedboard_defconfig
2) Merge in the , as this has bindings for the driver in question (I'll only be pulling in AMBA/AXI related entries)
3) See how well it boots up
4) If the magic smoke favors my efforts, reconfigure, rinse, repeat until I get a Linux prompt.
This seems like a safe approach to me since I'm using pinmux/frequency/allmost-everything settings from the Parallella dts, and the bitstream from the Parallella. Yes, there'll be a whole bunch of different drivers configured (a diff between the kernel configs a few weeks back was not insignificant - partly due to difference in versions I expect), but I can't see that being much of an issue - just might be missing stuff I need. Like boot params (console on the right port, correct mmc interface, etc).
Any comments from the experts?