I will make some code clean and make the sound work in the next few days. It seems the sm501 sound driver needs a hardcoded 8051 firmware to work. Damn it. After these works are done, I will send the patches to loongson-dev maillist and merge it to linux-loongson-community and linux-mips mainline at last.

I am keeping moving....... Please wait.

ps: The linux kernel for gdium repository is here.

kill-bill:~# uname -a
Linux kill-bill 2.6.34-rc2 #24 PREEMPT Fri Apr 16 21:01:51 CST 2010 mips64 GNU/Linux
kill-bill:~# cat /proc/cpuinfo
system type : dexxon-gdium-2f-10inches
processor : 0
cpu model : ICT Loongson-2 V0.3 FPU V0.1
BogoMIPS : 598.01
wait instruction : no
microsecond timers : yes
tlb_entries : 64
extra interrupt vector : no
hardware watchpoint : yes, count: 0, address/irw mask: []
ASEs implemented :
shadow register sets : 1
core : 0
VCED exceptions : not available
VCEI exceptions : not available

Yesterday I installed the debian lenny on yeeloong 8101, the 10.1 inch notebook based on loongson 2F CPU for a friend. Then I find there is less English document describing how to do this. So I write the process down to anyone who is interested in installing debian on yeloong. There are many ways to do it I choose the way of using a debian network installer. Please make sure you have a internet connection first.

1. First download the kernel and initrd to your PC.

wget http://dev.lemote.com/drupal/sites/default/files/kernel-2.6.27-LM8089.tar.gz
wget http://dev.lemote.com/drupal/sites/default/files/initrd_yl_netboot.gz

2. Decompress kernel on your PC.

tar zxvf kernel-2.6.27-LM8089.tar.gz

You will get the kernel vmlinux and the directory named lib. The lib directory contains all the kernel modules.

3. Format your USB disk with ext2 partition and copy vmlinux, directory lib and initrd_yl_netboot.gz to the usb disk.

4. Insert the usb disk to your netbook and boot it

5. Enter the PMON command line.

There are two ways to enter the PMON(the bootloader of yeeloong) command line. One is press DEL when booting. The other way is click C when you see the boot menu.

Use the following commands to load the kernel and initrd, which contains the debian network installer.

load /dev/fs/ext2@usb0/vmlinux
initrd /dev/fs/ext2@usb0/initrd_yl_netboot.gz

Please be patient. The initrd command may need more than 5 miniutes to be finished.

Sometimes the PMON bootloader may hang when you boot with a usb disk inserted. I do not know why. The workaround is booting into the default linux system and inserting the usb disk and then rebooting. Or you can use a tftp method to load the kernel and initrd.

At last use the following command to launch the debian network installer.

g console=tty no_auto_cmd

Then just install the debian as normal.

6. Install debian lenny

After debian configurating the DHCP, it will complain about "no kernel modules were found" and will let you choose "continue the install without loading kernel modules?", just choose Yes(the default answer is No) to continue.

When in the part of Partition disks, it will complain about "The current kernel doesn't support the Logical Volume Manager. You may need to load the lvm-mod modules" and the background becomes red. Do not be scared. Just click continue.

Then everything goes as it should be. But at last, debian installer will say "no installable kernel was found in the defined APT sources.... Continue without installing a kernel". Do not click Yes too quickly. We need to copy the kernel and all the modules into new system first. Please make sure that the USB disk is still inserting on the notebook. Use ALT+F2 to active a console. Mount the use disk and copy kernel and libs.

mount /dev/sda1 /target/mnt
cp /mnt/vmlinux /target/boot
cp -rf /mnt/lib/modules /target/lib/

Then click ALT+F1 return to the debian installer. Click Yes to continue installing.

7. Install Desktop environment

You can install LXDE or gnome as your desktop. I prefer LXDE because it is light.

apt-get install lxde

Install the X server driver.

wget http://www.anheng.com.cn/loongson2f/lenny/xorg-server/xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion_2.2.8-lemote.r04_mipsel.deb
dpkg -i xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion_2.2.8-lemote.r04_mipsel.deb

Change the xorg.conf according to this link.

8. Trouble shooting

(1) My wifi does not work

You can see "rtl8187: rtl8187_open process failed because radio off" if you use dmesg to see the message. Use FN+F5 to turn on the wifi first. You will see such message "rtl8187: SCI interrupt Methord Will Turn Radio On" on your console.

(2) My sound does not work

Use alsamixer to adjust the volume. But install alsa-utils first.

(3) OOPS, I forget to copy kernel to my new installed system. I can not boot it now. What should I do?

You can load the kernel using tftp method.

For the sake of portability, the new version of qemu uses TCG, a tiny code generator, instead of dyngen to generate host code. That means one backend is needed for each host architecture. There are i386,x86_64,ppc,ppc64 and hppa backend in TCG, but MIPS is not on the list.

I confirm this conclusion on the status page of qemu web site. The MIPS's status is 'Not Supported'. Perhaps these days the most emergent work is to add MIPS host support, instead of loongson guest support to qemu.

Although a little dissatisfied with the shipping express, gdium seems very attractive to me at my first glance for its smart size and its black color. It spend me a little time to make the battery work because I do not know how to assemble the battery at first. The speed of gdium is not as good as I had expected for a 900MHZ CPU. But there is room for optimization because of the N32 MIPS ABI. The screen resolution is excellent, 1024*600 is enough for most of the web sites. The Chinese fonts display very well when I visit the sina.com.cn, thanks to wqy fonts. The Youtube videos can also display very well in Firefox. Awesome! I do not find which plugin does firefox use to display the flash, gnash maybe? The gtk desktop is not very fluent, but that's ok because I will replace it with a lightweight desktop.

Gdium, to me, is a development platform more than a notebook for daily use. I want a MIPS development platform for a long time and gdium is the very one. It is better than the yeeloong notebook, which I planned to buy a few months ago, for gdium has an bigger LCD and good look.

I have too many plans on this new toy, porting android, porting lguest and kvm. But the issue is there is no uart interface on gdium. If you want the uart interface, you need to seal it by yourself. That is too hard to me, a hardware beginner.

If there is an emulator of gdium, life would be much easier. I can use the emulator to test the pmon/linux kernel and lguest porting. I know I can develop a gdium emulator based on qemu, but I have done too much about the emulator stuff, qemu-omap3, qemu-jz, virtualmips and a little fed up with emulator development. But emulator is really a big helper for kernel related development......

Following is my todo list these months.

• install debian and a lightweight desktop for gdium
• develop an emulator of gdium based on qemu
• port lguest and kvm to MIPS
• port android to gdium and tune the performance of dalvik runtime on MIPS target

These days I am always thinking about bringing virtualization into MIPS's world. You know, xen has been ported into ARM by Samsung and kvm into PPC by IBM. X86, not even to say,  has the most complete support of virtualization in hardware and software. But to MIPS, there is nothing. Neither there is no virtualization support in MIPS's world nor anyone wants to do this(at least I have NOT heard of that).

I think you may ask who needs virtualization or why we need virtualization in MIPS's world. Well, that's a good question which is not easy to answer. Let's divide MIPS's world into two parts: high performance computing and embedded devices. For the first part, the advantage of virtualization is obvious, for example, making better resource utilization.To the embedded world, let's use mobile phone as an example, using virtualization can make your device more secure by isolating the critical part, communicating protocol for example, from feature rich os(linux for example). Because of isolation, the virus on linux can not control your system's critical part.

Loongson has done great job in developing 2E and 2F, but that's not enough. I find that loongson has put many effort into x86 binary translation acceleration in last few years. That's a good point to get more market share. But we need to consider one thing first, if one customer wants to buy a MIPS translated x86 cpu, why does not he buy a x86 cpu directly? I think there is one area which loongson should put even more effort into. That is virtualization!

Virtualization can be achieved by hardware and/or software, with the better performance if hardware supports this feature. To the software virtualization, we already have xen/kvm/lguest and OKL4(it seems to focus on embedded world). Xen is a paravirtualization solution while kvm is a full virtualization solution. The most obvious difference between paravirtualization and full virtualization is prarvirtualization needs to modify the guest operation system while full virtualization needn't. Of course you can do this in full virtualization to achieve better performance.

According to MIPS, I think there should be a solution of virtualization. Either kvm or xen is ok. The important part is that we need to have one. That's what I was planned todo even in one year ago when I was busy developing virtualmips. I spent some days on porting lguest to jz4740 in last July. But at last I gave up. Now I want to do it again. I plan to port lguest to jz4740 and  loongson 2f first. With the help of this experience, I can gain some knowledge about virtualization on MIPS platform. And then kvm is planned to be ported to loongson 2f. Image that one day we can run five linux operating systems on loongson 2f at the same time, is it cool?

If you are interested in virtualization, let's work together to make this happen. Do not leave MIPS alone while other boys all have virtualization to play with.