Booting PandaBoard

Follow up to the reply to the Cortex-A9 thread on “Porting RISCOS” as I don’t want to get in the way of real development discussion but am having difficulty getting RISCOS booted on a Pandaboard.

I’ve been using Panda for some time doing Ubuntu 12.04 testing so hopefully I have played around with the bootloaders etc enough to not be doing something stupid.

I’ve been trying to create an SDCard from scratch because I don’t have a RISCOS system to use for !SDCreate and couldn’t get it going despite reading the instructions under RPCEmu (maybe I have been away from RISCOS too long…) but I am using the panda boot script from the latest !SDCreate.

Anyway on my first attempt last night using the MLO and u-boot.bin from the beta release of ubuntu precise 12.04 for omap4/panda I got as far on the serial output as Board config=PandaBoard where it stopped and didnt proceed.

Tonight I have tried both the MLO and u-boot.bin from the Pandaboard.org validation image and also the pandroid versions which both then get further to ModuleInit and then stall permanently.

Am I missing something silly here or do I need a specific MLO and uboot that I havent yet found to download?

This is the current serial output:

1. Starting application at 0×81000000 …
   OMAP4 HAL init
   Board config=PandaBoard
   HAL_Init
   HAL initialised
   InitCMOSCache entry
   InitCMOSCache done
   IMB_Full done
   Keyboard scan complete
   Reset CMOS
   VduInit
   ExecuteInit
   KeyInit
   MouseInit
   OscliInit
   Enabling IRQs
   IRQs on
   HAL_InitDevices
   HAL RTC detected!
   Leaving LookForHALRTC
   InitVariables
   AMBControl_Init
   ModuleInit

Any suggestions? Sorry to be a nuisance but its got me stumped.

Gareth

Are you making sure that the first file written to your SDCard is the MLO file as this is important.

Doug

Doug,

Yes I’ve been reformatting the FAT partition, copying MLO, then u-boot.bin then the RISCOS specifics e.g. boot.scr riscos etc on my Ubuntu laptop and have quite a routine set up there. I have found all sorts of versions of MLO/u-boot from the different Ubuntu images out there, the Pandaboard validation image, Android, Angstrom etc but none seem to boot RISCOS although they appear to hang at different stages.

If I replace the MLO and u-boot.bin on my Ubuntu SDCard with any of them it still boots, and likewise if I drop my Ubuntu kernel and initrd onto my RISCOS SDCard I can boot those too, which leads me to suspect its something else I am doing wrong. For all I know it could be the 2nd April ROM just doesn’t boot as like everything its work in progress but it doesn’t seem possible to download an older one from the website.

I’ll probably leave trying again until there is another ROM to try and I don’t really want to keep repeatedly removing the SDCard. If anyone was willing to contact me off list with a known working image to dd to a card I’d be grateful but of course I understand why the boot loader specifics aren’t available from this site.

The only hardware rather than software thing I hadn’t considered is that I am powering the Panda via the USB OTG port rather than the 5v jack as I haven’t bought a suitable adaptor yet, but it will quite happily run Ubuntu like that even with quite cpu intensive tasks on the go. If that is the issue I’ll be off to Maplin in the morning for a suitable PSU!!

Gareth

The comment from Sprow here https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/9/topics/972 does suggest you might have just been unlucky and picked a time when the Pandaboard ROM is unstable.

Bryan I suspect you are correct.

This morning I persevered and got RPCEmu up and running on my Mac to use !SDCreate.

The image created by !SDCreate behaves exactly the same as above and appears to hang at ModuleInit. So I am starting to believe I am unlucky enough to be trying as you say at a point where the ROM available to download has issues, or that it simply doesn’t like my board :(

Anyone know when another ROM image is likely to be available?

If you let me know your email address I can send you the files required to boot your Pandaboard.

Chris,

Thanks for the offer most kind!!

A few minutes after I posted the previous message I got things working. Would you believe of all things it was the USB keyboard I was using. It’s a Mac one with an extra port for the mouse and starting up with it unplugged using the image from !SDCreate I managed to get to the RISC OS boot screen text with “Waiting for boot drive to be ready; press Escape to cancel.” etc.

Reconnecting the keyboard the Panda stiffs instantly and on boot up again gets stuck. So I think I have narrowed the problem down now – time to go and find myself another keyboard out to try again. It could be power related of course so I think hunting down a decent 5 amp power supply is also the order of the day but I am making progress!

Thanks for the help!

Well success guys and thanks for putting up with me!!

I’ve now got the latest OMAP4 ROM booting reliably and have mostly got a working system.

Using a 4GB USB stick as the boot “hard drive” currently and transferred the latest HardDisc4 to it using the install script supplied with the ROM image.

One issue I do have, is that when I first tried to boot with the full !Boot on disc it stalled with an hourglass before getting to the desktop. I have tracked this down to PreDesk and the PreDesk.Configure.Monitor Obey file. The LoadModeFile line runs correctly, but the WimpMode line stiffs the system. I’m guessing this may be a known bug that will be resolved when Willi’s video drivers get committed back so I’m happy to wait and play with this.

Anyway I am happily running at 1600×1200 16mil colours as long as I set it manually via !Boot after I get the desktop – using the monitor icon in bottom right also locks up the system.

Next step find an MDF or have a play and try and chase 1920x modes.

I have EtherUSB installed and working so all in all very happy :)

I’m very pleased for all you PandaBoard developers and experimenters :-) Does ROOL have a board for the Wakefield Show?

Now that the Pandaboard is available I thought I’d get one for RISCOScode.
I ordered one two days ago from Digi-Key and, amazingly, it’s just arrived.

My hope is to get an “idiot’s guide” written on how to get RISC OS running on the Pandaboard up on RISCOScode within a week or so, and I was wondering if anyone who’s managed this would like to write it, with me then going through what’s written to make sure it works. Full credit given, standard article payment of £20, and I’m happy to take photo’s, do graphics etc.

I suspect the Pandaboard is going to run RISC OS faster than the Raspberry Pi so I think, as an upgrade, although more expensive, this will appeal. I may be wrong, but I sense the Pandaboard has been upstaged by Raspberry Pi and the Beagleboard, so there is an opportunity for the “RISC OS folk” to be seen as the guys enthusiastically doing things with it. Any thoughts on how the Pandaboard is being received and fitting into the marketplace welcome.

If I don’t get a response within a few days, I’ll try to write the piece myself, but it’d come across as more on a community being enthusiastic about it, if someone else tackled it.

I’m very excited about how it will feel compared with my Risc PC, Iyonix, Beagleboard and VA on a windows machine.
With best wishes,
Martin Hansen
@RISCOScode
http://www.RISCOScode.com

My email is mhh@shrewsbury.org.uk

FYI, the PandaBoard ES has recently been mentioned as one alternative to the Raspberry Pi.

Starting application at 0×81000000 …
OMAP4 HAL init
Board config=PandaBoard

Is the last thing I see when I try to use the latest (April 16) OMAP4 ROM version. Does this version work? I have tried different versions of MLO, u-boot.bin and two older OMAP4 ROM versions, with and without keyboard and mouse. What else can I try? I have a PandaBoard es.

That version of the OMAP4 ROM was broken, (Same issue as the OMAP3 ROM)
Can you please try the latest OMAP4 ROM, dated 17th April.

MLO files more recent than November 2011 cause RISC OS to fail to boot on a Pandaboard ES.
I’ve uploaded a zip file containing the necessary files to boot a Pandaboard ES here. Booting a normal Pandaboard should work too but this is untested. Also included is a rom image containing the missing video fixes.

hi,
i am trying to install RISCOS on pandaboard but it stuck on the this screen saying…“Waiting for boot drive to be ready; press Escape to cancel” i waited to hours but no luck…still stuck here… any idea how to resolve this issues.

I take it that Escape doesn’t help? If it does, you should then get the * prompt, at which you can type desktop. (BTW I don’t have a PandaBoard, so apologies if that’s no help.)

*desktop … works. A basic Desktop will be open.
At first start without the Message you need a adfs-formated USB Stick with the extract HardDisk4-Image. For HD-Boot you need a CMOS-File. The “To Do” you can find in the “Beagle (OMAP3)-section”.

Even after doing all of the above you may still see this error.

It is caused by where the keyboard is in relation to other USB storage devices and your ADFS RISC OS “hard drive”

I mentioned it here:

https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/4/topics/942

I haven’t had a chance to revert to RISC OS 5.18 on the ARMini and, of course, my PandaBoard ES is running the latest 5.19…

I’ve uploaded a zip file containing the necessary files to boot a Pandaboard ES here.

Many thanks. I tried using the boot.scr created by the OMAP4 !SDCreate but that insisted on booting up in Lionux command line.

I now have a pandaboard ES booting into riscos (no cmos because the default SCSI drive 0 suits me).

Hi there,

After fighting docs and trying very hard to boot Risc OS 5 on my Pandaboard ES, I really need help! This is the single hardest OS I’ve ever tried to boot in ANY device…

Well, until now, I tried to setup the boot SD card myself in a variety of ways, both in Linux and Windows: I tried FAT16 and FAT32, I tried LBA for both, I enabled the boot flag in Linux fdisk… And always with the files in the BOOT dir of the zip file uploaded by Chris Gransden, of course, wich is supposed to contain everything needed to boot a Pandaboard ES.

The result, until then, was STATUS LED 2 always ON, wich showed I hadn’t setup the card as it’s expected.

So next I downloadad the Beagleboard-XM image and restored it to SD with Winimage. I replaced the files (MLO, uboot.bin, RISCOS, etc…) with the ones in the Chris Gransden zip.

Now I get LED1 and LED2 constantly ON, but I can’t see anything on screen. Is this expected if it’s now trying to found the Hardisk4 files on an USB stick?
I formatted an USB stick in FAT-16 and copied the bz2 Hardisk4 dir contents to it, but it won’t change anything: LED1 and LED2 are ON and there’s nothing on screen.

So my guess is that I need an specially formatted USB stick to contain the HD4 files.
What filesystem/format should I use? What tool (for Linux or Windows) can I use to setup it properly? I don’t have a Risc OS machine, in fact I’m trying to try the system!

I really need help here…
Maybe some good fellow could create an img from a ready-to-go USB stick the same way you uploaded the SD card contents?

thanks!

I’m not sure of the Panda hardware, though I’d have thought using the Beagle code on a Panda would be met with limited success?

Glad to know I’m not the only person going “grrrr!” at a non-responsive lump. I thought the idea behind using SD cards was to make things easier!

Martin – how fast d’you want RISC OS? ;-) Are you hoping if we throw enough welly at it, we can just ignore the DSP parts and do video decodes purely in software?!?

The day RISC OS can play my HD version of Summer Wars (which is H.264 at some insanely high bitrate; my PC chokes attempting to play it), will be the day I have died and gone to heaven.

I didn’t try to run any Beagleboard code in the Pandaboard ES: I replaced Bleagleboard files with the Pandaboard ES ones cotained in the pandaboot.zip file. I ONLY used the Beagleboard img to restore the adequate partition scheme into the SD card.

This is the single hardest OS I’ve ever tried to boot in ANY device…

Don’t worry about the disk image for the mo. If you can boot to the Supervisor * prompt, that can all be set up from the desktop. (Also bear in mind that UK posters on here have 2 bank hols coming up (Mon/Tue) so there could be a little wait for the answers you need… sorry if you are in the UK/already knew this, but thought it worth mentioning just in case.)

Hi Trevor, and thanks for your patient response for a Risc OS beginner like me.

Do you mean I should be able to boot into a prompt with just the memory card? Is that prompt supposed to be visible via HDMI video connector, or do I need a serial connection to access it?

I’m not in UK, I’m in spain. And I’m the only Risc OS user-wannabe I know about around here.

First, it is important to know that only the outer HDMI port works with RISCOS.
As a second then you will need the correct boot files. If both lights are on you have probably already. Not the case, send me an email. You can find my adresse here:
http://home.arcor.de/raik_fischer