So the background is that I have a lovely little unit called a Mirabox but I need to update the kernel on it.   I spent a good bit of time looking at various forums and eventually managed to piece together enough information to get a 3.9 kernel to boot for me.

First, I installed a cross compiler, then I built a kernel, with default options, like so.


PATH="/home/build/smile/armv7-marvell-linux-gnueabi/bin:$PATH" make ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-marvell-linux-gnueabi- mvebu_defconfig

./scripts/mkuboot.sh -A arm -O linux -T kernel -C none -a 0x00008000 -e 0x00008000 -n 'Linux-marvell' -d zImage-with-dtb uImage


This kernel booted, but could not find a root filesystem. After a spending a bit of time looking, I could not find a NAND driver, so I opted for a filesystem on MicroSD instead.

Next, I replaced the kernel configuration with the one in this post, and rebuilt it. While that was building, I followed the instructions in this post, to create the filesystem on a MicroSD card.

Finally, I dropped the uImage created above onto a tftp server, loaded it with

tftpboot 0x6400000 10.4.50.166:uImage
set bootargs 'console=ttyS0,115200 root=/dev/sdb2 rootwait'
bootm

and the result is a working system.

root@dreamplug-debian:~# cat /proc/version
Linux version 3.9.0 (root@ubuntu-smile-build) (gcc version 4.2.0 20070413 (prerelease) (CodeSourcery 2007q1-10. Marvell 2009q3-11 20090730)) #2 Fri May 3 15:27:05 IST 2013
root@dreamplug-debian:~#


A very satisfying way to finish up before a long weekend!