On Wed, 24 Aug 2011 11:02:53 +0200, Florian Fainelli <flor...@openwrt.org> wrote: > 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.
No, it's not definetely binary-only... I had to accomplish quite a quest to make it compile a month or so ago. uClibc looks quite recent (0.9.30). I haven't diffed it to vanilla, yet. >> >> 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 http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2005-05/msg01249.html The only thing I found. > 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. The only blob I saw was fw that loads into wireless. May be I didn't look good enough. >> * 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 Yes, that would be awesome. Thanks. Regards, Andrew _______________________________________________ openwrt-devel mailing list openwrt-devel@lists.openwrt.org https://lists.openwrt.org/mailman/listinfo/openwrt-devel
