PandaBoard

We have active devs? That’s the first I’ve heard about this! ;)

I’ve just done a quick update to the todo list on this page. I’ll update it some more when I get home.

Someone’s registered a tablet project although its project website is currently little other than an email address.

I know someone living round the corner from me who’s considering buying a PandaBoard for Linaro work. If he does, I’ve asked him if I can possibly use it to get some debug output from RISC OS. Will post on this again if/when he gets the board.

Edit: Also, Syslink Project for future reference.

I doubt there’s much point in doing that, unless someone offers to start work on a port. I had a brief look at the OMAP4 TRM a few weeks ago and it looks like enough has changed that I wouldn’t guarantee that any of the existing OMAP3 code will work. Plus RISC OS most likely won’t recognise the CPU, causing it to just sit in a loop and do nothing.

Just a quick note to ask if anyone has tried RISC OS on the pandaboard?

Not to my knowledge. But it won’t get very far through the startup process, I can tell you that much. From a quick look I had at the OMAP4 TRM a while ago, it looks like the best course of action would be to build up a new HAL from scratch (although a lot of the OMAP3 code could probably be copied over with only minimal modifications).

(Ah, I now see that it was this thread where I mentioned previously looking at the TRM, right above Stephen’s post!)

This fan is perhaps a good reason not to, if you appreciate the silence of your OMAP3 machine!

Willi Theiss has some speed comparisons with the IGEPv2 for the Pandaboard!¹

¹ Cross-posted to this thread because the project listed on pandaboard.org includes a link here (but not to the newer thread).

Variscite now has a dual core OMAP4460 based development board available, the VAR-DVK-OM44. I’ve not requested a price but (based on similar development kits elsewhere, and that fact that TI is subsidising the PandaBoard) it’s not likely to be cheap. SATA is via USB and the speed is up to 1.5GHz.

perhaps this is a better place to ask those who already have managed to run RISC OS on the PandaBoard how they setup the bootscript.
currently i have tried a couple of variants but no luck.
!SDCreate in the OMAP4 release has no Panda.scr so no info on how to boot RISC OS on the Panda..

Hi Jan,
the !SDCreate application in the OMAP4 ROM package is simply a copy from the OMAP3 package; it was never adapted for Pandaboard.
When I started with my pandaboard I did try to find a script based method for starting RISCOS; but without any success. In the
end I have patched my uboot image so that it contains the start of RISC OS instead of the linux image.

If you can provide your contact details I can send you the necessary files.

Hi Willi,

you can send them to my gmail account janrinze
gmail accounts are: @gmail.com
To avoid spam i generally use the above description ;-)

On the serial port the RISC OS ROM boots pretty far.

Texas Instruments X-Loader 1.5.0 (Apr 11 2011 - 09:48:22)                       
Reading boot sector                                                             
Loading u-boot.bin from mmc                                                     
                                                                                
                                                                                
U-Boot 2011.03 (Apr 20 2011 - 07:37:43)                                         
                                                                                
CPU  : OMAP4430                                                                 
Board: OMAP4 Panda                                                              
I2C:   ready                                                                    
DRAM:  1 GiB                                                                    
MMC:   OMAP SD/MMC: 0                                                           
Using default environment                                                       
                                                                                
In:    serial                                                                   
Out:   serial                                                                   
Err:   serial                                                                   
Hit any key to stop autoboot:  0                                                
reading boot.scr                                                                
                                                                                
120 bytes read                                                                  
Running bootscript from mmc0 ...                                                
## Executing script at 82000000                                                 
reading riscos                                                                  
                                                                                
4194304 bytes read                                                              
## Starting application at 0x81000064 ...                                       
OMAP4 HAL init                                                                  
Board config=PandaBoard                                                         
HAL_Init                                                                        
HAL initialised                                                                 
InitCMOSCache entry                                                             
InitCMOSCache done                                                              
IMB_Full done                                                                   
Keyboard scan complete                                                          
VduInit                                                                         
ExecuteInit                                                                     
KeyInit                                                                         
MouseInit                                                                       
OscliInit                                                                       
Enabling IRQs                                                                   
IRQs on                                                                         
HAL_InitDevices                                                                 
Audio_Init                                                                      
McPDM @ f9e32000                                                                
Audio_Init done                                                                 
HAL RTC detected!                                                               
Leaving LookForHALRTC                                                           
InitVariables                                                                   
AMBControl_Init                                                                 
ModuleInit                                                                      
OMAP4Video:                                                                     
            OMAP4Video: ***** Debug Session Started ****************************
**********                                                                      
          OMAP4Video: DebugLib is (c) Pace Micro Technology plc. 1997-2001      
                                                                          OMAP4V
ideo: System: DebugLib 0.65                                                     
                           OMAP4Video:         remotedb 0.10                    
                                                            OMAP4Video:         
PDebug 0.07                                                                     
           OMAP4Video: Task:   OMAP4Video                                       
                                         OMAP4Video: Time:   Fri Jan  2 00:00:00
 1970                                                                           
     OMAP4Video: Levels: Not specified.                                         
                                       OMAP4Video: *****************************
*************************************                                           
                                     OMAP4Video: Using DMA channel at f9b56c20  
                                                                              OM
AP4Video: dss_reset

And then it sits there. So possibly the latest ROM may not work for my board.
Perhaps you can send me your ROM too?

lovely how the forum re-formats the console output :-)

[Edit by sysadmin: Fixed by adding ‘pre’ and ‘notextile’ wrappers for you]

re-formats the console output

As well as using HTML <pre> tags (not forgetting the blank lines), apparently there’s also pre., which is a new one on me.

Sorry for the advert!

You can see a Pandaboard running RISC OS at the next ROUGOL meeting on 19th March.

Details on the website – http://rougol.jellybaby.net/