Hello Andrew, On Wednesday 24 August 2011 07:34:19 Andrew wrote: > Hello all, > I'm currently working on the rtl8196 OpenWRT port. My initial patches can > be found here: > http://invyl.ath.cx/cgit/cgit.cgi/openwrt/ > > I'm currently using external rsdk-linux- toolchain, that came along with > the bsp from the trendnet router. > The actual hardware is a edup pocket router. > It's kind of old: (gcc 3.4).
This toolchain has two problems from an OpenWrt perspective: it is in binary form and it is old. Fortunately, I have some patches around to support lexra core based on gcc-4.1.2, which should be easy to forward port. > > The current state is: > * Initial stuff commited to OpwnWRT makefiles, > * Initial patches to make the kernel somewhat compile are ready. > I'm now working out the linker problems and writing the image packager > Makefile > > My questions here are: > Is OpenWRT okay with this archeological gcc? Or should I expect more weird > bugs? I think you will hit some strange bugs. > Since the CPU is LexraCore it misses some patented instructions so usual > mips-linux- toolchain won't work > without hacing it. There used to be a patch at > gcc maillists, but it doesn't look like it made it into the main branch. No it's definitively not in mainline gcc, I do not think anyone ever submitted patches to get it supported, though this should not be too hard. The patents have now expired (they expired in dec. 2006 iirc), so there should not be any political issue anymore. > > What conserns the kernel, I tried to apply the minimal set of patches to > make this stuff work. > However, some subsystems are quite a mess. This is the current state: > * board support is sh*tty in the bsp, symlinked to out of kernel dir and > with little board-specific code. > needs a full rewrite. Yes, it does. > * mtd dev support needs some cleaup (shouldn't be that difficult) > * lan and wifi are messy, but kind of work, I just didn't have the ocasion > to have a closer look at them I have a device here based on the RTL856x core, which is using some binary blobs to do layer-4 offloading, this should hopefully not concern you, since RTL8196 has a real Ethernet MAC. > * gpio support sucks: they made it a char dev incompatible with mostly > anything. Board-specific code in the driver > itself. Needs a full rewrite. > * Some files in the kernel are symlinks to something like > /home/$codemonkeyname/somedir..../file.c. Hopefully I've > cleaned that all. If you are interested, I can send you clean patches which add support for RTL856x, on which you could also based yours, because RTL8196 is not that different from RTL865x -- Florian _______________________________________________ openwrt-devel mailing list openwrt-devel@lists.openwrt.org https://lists.openwrt.org/mailman/listinfo/openwrt-devel
