Test Kernel for PS3: linux-ports 2.6.25-1.3~danm1

[Dan Munckton]

Hi ubuntu-cell, kernel-team

As promised I did manage to find time to work on the PS3 kernel this
last weekend. You can find the sources and a build for powerpc64-smp
here:

http://ubuntu.munckfish.net/linux-ports/

WARNING TO NON-DEVS: THIS IS A DEVELOPMENT BUILD. DO NOT INSTALL THIS
UNLESS YOU KNOW HOW TO RETURN TO AN OLDER STABLE KERNEL.

kernel-team: this is a rough build, please cut me some slack - I am
still getting started with the kernel team dev process and still
learning from mistakes on the way. Before pushing to zinc I will be
redoing everything cleanly (e.g. changelog, commit ordering). Also this
time, for the sake of speed, I've not used a custom binary build as was
previously suggested.


FEEDBACK NEEDED

1) General PS3 hardware support. Realistically I won't be able to test
wireless soon so could someone try that out? 

2) Someone to test out on other PowerPC 64 hardware. I am confident this
build + the two Cell patches shouldn't regress anything. But better to
be sure.

3) hppa, ia64, and sparc folks willing to build from my sources and
assert there are no regressions. I honestly don't believe any change
I've made touches anything that will affect these archs but, again, I'd
rather be sure.

Any other problems please let me know.


CHANGES

* Rebased on 2.6.25.7 from upstream. A couple of Geoff's Cell patches
have now been absorbed into this release so less to apply ourselves.

* Set CONFIG_FB_PS3_DEFAULT_SIZE_M=9. Frees 9MB of RAM (was set to 18),
makes usplash work, and changes the nature of the hang at shutdown (LP
#220370). Unfortunately also makes X boot using 800x600. See known
issues below.

* Enabled PS3 Gelic Wireless support.

* Enabled support for the PS3 Logical Performance Monitor. Required for
oprofile and perfmon2 support.

* SAUCE: powerpc-vmemmap-variable-page-size.diff. Fix for LP #220524.
See [0].

* SAUCE: ps3-system-bus-quiet-match-output.patch. Low impact patch
makes kernel log output less noisy/distracting. See [0].



KNOWN ISSUES

* Still hangs at poweroff. At least now that the framebuffer has been
set to 9MB we get an error message output. I've already started a thread
about this on the cbe-oss-dev list, and will follow up.

* ABI & module checks not run :( kernel was built with AUTOBUILD=1.
Sorry will rectify this next time.

* free -m still reports only 221MB total memory. Arguably this is a lot
better than the 86MB we were stuck with before. I will cont. to explore
this.

* Although usplash now works nicely, X/GDM starts in 800x600.
Investigation pending.


Thanks

Dan

[0]
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/geoff/ps3-linux-patches.git;a=tree;f=backports;h=3e53e0dcd6a8e5bbdab8da1f17b7337d30cbbaf7;hb=2e410184ec76fe9bea46ed7c2cf42cbbdd9440ad