How To Compile Your Own Kernels, Modules, Tinboot (NAND boot), and More for Beginners

[natemcnutty]

Originally Posted by oisact

The first line is missing "git clone" at the beginning.
The second repository, xdandroid-eclair/eclair-rootfs.git cannot be found.

Thanks, they changed it because eclair in the name wasn't good. I fixed both in the first post, and I have updated the script. My VM is down right now, so I filled in the squashfs-tools part as best as I could remember. Let me know if you find anything not working, and I'll update it (or I'll fix anything I see once my VM is done repairing...

[oisact]

Thanks. I got it. I'm trying to build under OSX. The main difference is that OSX filesystem is typically not case sensitive by default, so you have to create an image that is case sensitive in which to build Android. It seems the paths are hardcoded to the user's root directory though. So it's looking in /Users/USERNAME/android/prebuilt/...etc for GCC. In my case it needs to be looking in /Volumes/Android/prebuilt/...

So I might have to tweak some makefiles or shell variables. I'll post here if I have success building under OSX.

[natemcnutty]

Wirelessly posted (Opera/9.80 (Android; Opera Mini/6.0.24463/24.746; U; en) Presto/2.5.25 Version/10.54)

Originally Posted by oisact

Thanks. I got it. I'm trying to build under OSX. The main difference is that OSX filesystem is typically not case sensitive by default, so you have to create an image that is case sensitive in which to build Android. It seems the paths are hardcoded to the user's root directory though. So it's looking in /Users/USERNAME/android/prebuilt/...etc for GCC. In my case it needs to be looking in /Volumes/Android/prebuilt/...

So I might have to tweak some makefiles or shell variables. I'll post here if I have success building under OSX.

I'm not very familiar with OS X, but for the git cloning part, just make a folder somewhere like your desktop, then use bash to browse into that folder and start cloning in there. Then if you use my sh script, you can just change the variable for the Android folder path in the header section. and it should work great after that.

[oisact]

I'm making progress. The build command has to be tweaked to use the right set of gcc binaries for OSX:

make ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=~/android/prebuilt/darwin-x86/toolchain/arm-eabi-4.4.0/bin/arm-eabi-  INSTALL_MOD_PATH=~/android/modules zImage modules modules_install

mk_elfconfig.c is failing to compile because it can't find the header elf.h, so I think that an include path is not being set.

However just prior to that sed is failing in scripts/checksyscalls.sh with what appears to be a malformed regular expression: "bad flag in substitute command: '}'.

[oisact]

Others have had this problem as well building linux in general under OSX. Here's one specific to Android, exact same errors I see:
Issue 2755 - android - Cannot build ARM android/linux kernel on Mac OS - Android - An Open Handset Alliance Project - Google Project Hosting

This solution seems to be working. It completed building but I don't know if it produced anything patent. Still had errors related to mk_elfconfig.c, but it continued on.

[oisact]

Okay, my build produced 53 .ko files and my modules tar.gz is 7 MB. The various FRX0 builds' modules are less than 1 MB. Am I doing something wrong?

[rpierce99]

Originally Posted by oisact

Okay, my build produced 53 .ko files and my modules tar.gz is 7 MB. The various FRX0 builds' modules are less than 1 MB. Am I doing something wrong?

When you build modules they have debugging symbols included, you need to strip the files before you tar.gz them.

[oisact]

Thanks. The strip command in the darwin_x86 bin directory must be used on OSX. The native strip command doesn't work.

It appears everything is building successfully, however the booting freezes just after haret finishes loading and it vibrates twice. No black console boot screen is displayed.

I'm not entirely clear on modules tarball. According to the instructions in this thread, I thought that it should have a data/modules folder structure, in which the ko files reside. However looking at the FRX05 modules tar.gz shows a flat file structure. I've tried both.

Any suggestions on how to proceed from here? Anyone want to take a look at the zimage and modules tarball I've built?

[oisact]

I'm using the following script to automatically generate the proper module tarball name so I don't have to rename it manually:

# Generate module name. Assumes lib/modules contains one subdir with the target name
cd $MODULES_PATH/lib/modules
MODNAME=$(ls -d */)
MODNAME=modules-${MODNAME%/}.tar.gz

Just thought you might want to incorporate it in your build script to save the manual work.

[Lmiller1708]

Originally Posted by oisact

Thanks. The strip command in the darwin_x86 bin directory must be used on OSX. The native strip command doesn't work.

It appears everything is building successfully, however the booting freezes just after haret finishes loading and it vibrates twice. No black console boot screen is displayed.

I'm not entirely clear on modules tarball. According to the instructions in this thread, I thought that it should have a data/modules folder structure, in which the ko files reside. However looking at the FRX05 modules tar.gz shows a flat file structure. I've tried both.

Any suggestions on how to proceed from here? Anyone want to take a look at the zimage and modules tarball I've built?

Nand does not use the modules as a tar ball anymore. We use squash and they need to be made with version 3.4 (not the most recent one).
Nate posted how to install:

To set upsquashfs tools, download squashfs tools from here: ftp://ftp.slax.org/source/slax/sqlzm...shfs3.4.tar.gz
Now, extract the files, then browse into the squashfs3.4/squashfs-tools folder, then type make, then sudo make install.

As for you not being able to get past the frist boot screen it seems like your NBH is not being made correctly. We are in the process of changing the making all together. So you can test it for us.
Steps:
1. Add the attached nbgen.c to the tinboot/tool folder.
2. Change your Build or the NBH to this: (see my example)

echo "Creating NB..."
rm tools/nbgen    
if [ ! -f tools/nbgen ]; then
    gcc -std=c99 tools/nbgen.c -o tools/nbgen
fi
tools/nbgen os.nb

3. Build and enjoy!

If this does not work it could be something with wine and the yang tool.
So I also attached a different one. Try that out with this command:

tools/yang -F RHODIMG.NBH -f os.nb -t 0x400 -s 64 -d RHOD****0 -c 11111111 -v Tinboot -l WWE >> tools/log

Good luck!