[Milkymist-devel] Software task list

[Sébastien Bourdeauducq]

On Sunday 21 February 2010 12:34:19 Sébastien Bourdeauducq wrote:
> * Find out why kernel 2.6.33 freezes when running Busybox init (and fix).
> The symptom is the printing of the message:
> "mount: mounting /dev/root on / failed: Invalid argument"
> followed by a complete system lock-up. If this message is related to the
> crash, it suggests the mount API might have been changed between 2.6.26
>  (which works) and 2.6.33.
> http://github.com/tmatsuya/linux-2.6/issues#issue/5
> * Fix poll() system call
> http://github.com/lekernel/milkymist-linux/issues#issue/10
> * Fix /proc/self/exe
> http://github.com/lekernel/milkymist-linux/issues#issue/9

Above problems were fixed by Takeshi, thanks a lot :)

> * Develop an ALSA driver for the AC'97 controller

I have started working on this (using the ASoC framework):
* driver initialization and codec probe work
* mixer is almost done - needs to code in the LM4550's channel/switch list and 
how they map to the AC97 registers.
* slight problem with the mixer: when changing the volumes rapidly (several 
times per second), AC97 register writes sometimes time out.
* playback is beginning to work, only the output does not sound good: it seems 
that fragments that are not played in the correct order.
* recording is almost fully implemented, but not tested at all.
* my driver needs to be cleaned from its global variables (use a structure 
kmalloc'd in the probe function instead)

By the way, the combination of OpenCores's ethmac with the new ethernet driver 
in 2.6.33 (ethoc) seems really fouled up, which even more crashes, slowness, 
reboots, dropped packets, etc. (seems to be the usual lot of problems stemming 
from OpenCores stuff...). I do not recommend we spend too much time fixing 
that crap, we'd be better off with a shiny new and more resource-efficient 
Ethernet MAC and a driver developed from scratch.

Sébastien