STLinux Distribution-2.3 Release Notes

Changes from previous releases

• This release is built on RedHat Enterprise Linux 4 (RHEL4). Use of earlier releases of RHEL is no longer supported.
• Support for some old target devices has been dropped in this release, in particular ST40GX1, STi5528 and STm8000 are no longer supported.
• It is no longer possible to use the kernel command line mem= option to increase the amount of memory. Rebuild the kernel with the correct memory size. This option may still be used to reduce the amount of memory.
• Support for IDE drives is no longer available through the IDE subsystem, the new ATA subsystem should be used instead. The new pata_platform device is supported on most target platforms.
• The entire distribution is now built for both glibc and uclibc. However the uclibc version has had considerably less testing than glibc, and some problems still remain.

Missing features

• U-Boot cannot boot a 32 bit kernel.
• sh4-linux-gdb cannot debug a 32 bit kernel.
• FDMA acceleration of IDE devices is not yet available.

These will be added as updates over the next few weeks.

Known problems

• st40load_gdb loading initrd ramdisk images fails.
• Native compilation (ie compiling on the target) is broken.
• Erase of target packages which have uninstall scripts can fail.
• ALSA is currently broken.

32 bit support

One change in this release is support for 32 bit physical addressing on 7109cut3 and 7200. This is useful for systems which have 256Mb RAM or more.

To build for 32 bit mode, you will need to make two changes to the kernel build configuration: enable 32 bit operation (CONFIG_32BIT):

System type -->
  Memory management options -->
    Support 32-bit physical addressing through PMB

and change the physical memory start (CONFIG_MEMORY_START) to 0x40000000 (for both 7109 and 7200):

System type -->
  Memory management options -->
    Physical memory start address

Then build as normal.

For many target platforms, default kernel configs are available where 32 bit support is the default, these are identified by the "se" suffix.

To boot the kernel through gdb you need to select a gdb configuration function which enables SE mode and sets up a PMB mapping with LMI SYS mapped uncached (this will be converted to cached after the kernel has booted). For example:

• mb442stb7109seucbypass
• mb519seucbypass
• hms1stb7109seuccut30bypass128MB

Note that in general we are no longer providing variants of the gdb configuration functions to cope with board changes such as larger memory or different clock frequency. However this can now be handled by setting the appropriate variable on the st40load_gdb command line. For example:

-eval-command='set $_mb442stb7109sys128 = 1'