“Unsupported machine ID” after upgrading Linux kernel or U-boot

Unlike how I usually treat software tools I work with, my attitude towards U-boot is “if it works, never mind how and why”. Trying to understand the gory details of U-boot has never been very rewarding. Things work or break more or less randomly, depending on which git revision is checked out. Someone sent a [...]

Linux kernel platform device food chain example

Since the device tree is the new way to set up hardware devices on embedded platforms, I hoped that I could avoid the “platform” API for picking which driver is going to take control over what. But it looks like the /arch/arm disaster is here to stay for a while, so I need to at [...]

Reading the DocBook files in Linux kernel’s documentation

This is my short saga about my not necessarily intelligent actions for reading a DocBook paper. So I wanted to read some documentation from my Linux kernel sources. It happened to be in DocBook format. In the kernel source’s root, I tried $ make htmldocs or I could have gone $ make pdfdocs Or mandocs. [...]

Cache coherency on i.MX25 running Linux

What this blob is all about Running some home-cooked SDMA scripts on Freescale’s Linux 2.6.28 kernel on an i.MX25 processor, I’m puzzled by the fact, that cache flushing with dma_map_single(…, DMA_TO_DEVICE) doesn’t hurt, but nothing happens if the calls are removed. On the other hand, attempting to remove cache invalidation calls, as in dma_map_single(…, DMA_FROM_DEVICE) [...]