Getting official Debian support for the Dockstar

Hi Jeff,

Since we now have information about JTAG in the Dockstar, I was wondering if something could be done to get it officially supported by Debian. It is my understanding that JTAG access is a prerequisite to get official support. At his site, Martin Michlmayr says that only development kits will be supported (according to http://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/sheevaplug/plugs.html), but in his list of models that will be supported in the future he mentions the GuruPlug, since it has a documented JTAG interface.

Assuming that we could get the official support for the Dockstar, what else do we need? I have one question from the top of my head: what about patching the kernel to individually identify and support the Dockstar as some sort of SheevaPlug variant? A separate config kernel option for the Dockstar would be a more elegant solution than the original patches from Alexander Holler at http://ahsoftware.de/dockstar/ and could be submitted upstream. Any thoughts?

I think we have a pretty solid chance of getting support. We can flash a new uBoot to mtd0 and be pretty darn close to a sheevaplug, as far as the Debian installer is concerned. It would be great to get the LED patches applied to the kernel.

If you want to work up a cleaner kernel patch and get Martin Michlmayr in on this, please go for it. I'll be happy to help in any way I can.

-- Jeff

Eric, who wrote a fabulous HowTo to get OpenWRT running on the Dockstar registered 2998 as the ID for Dockstar. He also supplied the patch to linux-arm. No idea how long it is before the changes get approved, perhaps they are still waiting for the JTag solution

I used the instructions at plugcomputer.org to build a new kernel for Dockstar and then added the patch that Eric supplied. I'll be testing it this weekend.

Gerrit

There seems to be significant progress on the JTag front here.

Gerrit