Pandora Pandora Specs

[chuckr]

I've had a bit of trouble trying to get all of the info I need to do what I'm thinking about. My current idea is to see if it might be possible to get OpenBSD working on the Pandora. I know it doesn't currently work there, but I don't think it's that awful much of a stretch to make this happen. The trouble is, I need more info than I've been able to find, so far.

What I'd want most would be something like a "Pandora Technical Reference Manual", but I couldn't find any such thing. If someone were to post a URL for that, I would be extremely indebted to them.

If I can't get that, then here's a list of questions I'd begin with:
How can the Pandora boot, ALL possible methods, not just what's been accomplished so far. Can it boot with USB? Is there any tech details about booting via the flash card? Is there internal flash in the Pandora? Would you want to boot by putting an image there? Any tech details on that? Is there a Bluetooth interface? I'd want to see if it were possible to make it boot with BOTH the current Linux (including any system setup utilities) AND also with a new OpenBSD which I might write. Don't tell me how to do this, but pointing me at any URLs would be a good thing. What's in my mind is doing something along the line of Grub for Pandora, wouldn't that be a fine thing? I've got a big portable USB disk, so storage isn't a problem, I think. Also, remember that OpenBSD could run Linux binaries, at least, a lot of them.

If anyone knows of a mailing list (not a board) for Pandora technical topics, that would be something I'd like, I'm not as at home with boards as you might be.

 

[Exophase]

Get the TRM for the OMAP3530 and it'll tell you what you need to know. The chip can boot via NAND, SD, USB, and UART. I take it by "flash card" you mean SD card. I take it by "internal flash" you mean NAND flash (quantity is 512MB). There is a bluetooth chip. I don't know what your options will be as far as boot goes because I don't know what the Pandora's wired for (except that the boards we have are booting a boatloader off of NAND that scans SD). I don't know if that bootloader is capable of scanning anything else. Booting something off of SD certainly seems like the best idea, especially since there are 2 SD slots. The USB and UART boot options are more interesting for people designing a board with OMAP3530 where they don't want to throw a full SD interface onto it (and the NAND doesn't really work as a first time boot source). You should probably leave Pandora's NAND well enough alone.

Pandora is going to be booting some boot loaders already, but not the type that are meant to have a menu interface for booting multiple kernels ala GRUB, or at least I'm not aware of U-Boot having this functionality (but it can probably be hacked in). I also don't know what it'd be like supporting GRUB, ie if you can compile it down so that it doesn't need most of its bootloader functionality and is just used to decompress a kernel and run it (so it doesn't need to do all the setup that U-Boot is already doing.. and you don't want to replace U-Boot because it's doing important hardware pin muxing).

These boards or IRC are the best bet you have for talking about these things.

 

[Squidge]

The TRM is available to download from TI. The source code to the bootloader and Kernel is available via GIT.

The best way to boot is via SD card, although the SoC will also support USB and UART, I don't know if the final Pandora hardware will support it. You will need to put your file system on the SD card anyway, so I would stick with that rather than attempting to overwrite the NAND (flash).

Do note that USB Host doesn't work until the kernel is running, so you'll need to get that working first if thats where you intend to put your BSD file system. Overwriting the default uboot with grub is fine, but you will need a thorough knowledge of how the current uboot works in order to do that so grab the sources via GIT.

 

[Chip]

Links to the refrence manuals for most of the hardware can be found here: pandorawiki.org/Hardware_documentation

The GIT is here: git.openpandora.org

 

[viridior]

chuckr,

I wish you the best luck with your endeavor. I am one of the lead devs for Gentoo Pandora in which was have successfully ported Gentoo onto the OMAP3530 via the BeagleBoard rev B. Untested on the Pandora yet, but should work just fine.

Our project was independent of the official pandora devs so we may have some insight on starting from scratch and/or a repository of links that you may find useful. If you would like to talk more about it please join us in FreeNode#gentoo-pandora

Respectfully,
Viridior