<meino.cramer <at> gmx.de> writes:
> http://www.acmesystems.it/arietta A very neat looking device for arm9. > I setup a sdcard as described there and the board boots -- > as far as I can tell, since the user led on the board starts to > play the heartbeat blues ;) > Now... > I cannot access the board. It looks (quick scan of their site only) like the vendor is only supporting their debian image. So I would work with that image to profile and gain insight into what the kernel supports/needs and aget everything working first with their debian image.... > As far as I understood the docs, the board uses ethernet over usb > and I thought (read: dont know for sure), that gentoo should > load the appropiate kernel modules itsself ... but it doesnt. Look carefully at the docs the vendor supplies. Reseach what is typcially included with a generic arm9 processor and what features they make available, to the pins on there board. There might me a serial port console hardwared to a grooup of 2 or 3 pins. You might have to "toggle" some of the debian software to activate the serial console, as it is normal for embedded board vendors to support a lesser number of pins on the circuit board to minmize the size, while claiming a greater number of features that (possibly) exist in sofware. Often you have to pay extra for keen features to be enable. Understand this about "ARM" processors. ARM ltd owns reference designs and implementations. Different vendors either license and modify (customize) the arm processor or license from another licensee a unique arm implementation. So the Vendors 100% control the actual processor's features and most use a matrix to figure out what and whom to make available to it's customers. I. E. there is no such thing as a "Arm 9" processor because there are thousands of variants. This is one the keenest reasons for theirn(ARM Ltd) success as their licensees have a granularity of control over their products that no other silicon (wholesaler) vendor allows, except for expensive custom FPGA and ASIC based processors. So this also means that both the NSA and Other countries intelligence services can have undocumented features (backdoors if you like) into any hareware that you purchase; not limited to ARM. Your vendor holds the keys to what you seek. However, over time folks discover things by "brute force experimentation" very simimlar to software hacking...... WRT (& others) has many images that work on many different arm processors, so that is also a good keyword to include in your searches. If you are stuck on running gentoo on an arm 9, find a reference implementation for embedded gentoo on an arm-9 and start there. If that does not exist, start with the debian embedded linux the vendor offers. Arm 9 emulator on your workstation might also help decyphering and debugging codes and hardware in the arm 9 family. Good hunting! James
