Re: [gentoo-soc] Gentoo musl Support Expansion for Qt/KDE Week 8

[EBo <ebo@sandien.com>]

I'm not one of your mentors (I am a former GSOC intern and mentor; which 
explains why I am still on the lists).

All of this sounds like wonderful progress.  The one thing I have not 
seen you mention is documentation, quick-starts, and verification that 
they are really up to date.  Spending a week or two on those to polish 
then up would be a wonderful addition.

   EBo --

On Aug 7 2022 8:01 PM, cat@catcream.org wrote:
> This week I've spent most of my time getting Gentoo musl to run on my
> PinePhone Pro and packaging mauikit apps. I have also done some minor
> testing on KDE applications and some other miscellaneous things.
> 
> In my proposal I had initially planned on porting KDE applications and
> making them build on Gentoo musl the following two weeks, and then
> making sure test suites run the week following that. But I've already
> gotten kde-apps-meta installed and the programs are working well for
> the most part. Though I haven't enabled every use flag for the KDE
> apps and I haven't ran every test suite so there's definitely work to
> do left, just not 3 weeks work. So instead I asked Sam if I could
> spend some time working on getting Gentoo musl to run on my PinePhone
> Pro with Plasma Mobile as a side project.
> <!--more-->
> 
> Starting with the PinePhone. The Gentoo install itself was pretty
> smooth and I didn't run into any major issues. But I really got stuck
> on some other more low level and non-Gentoo bits.
> The first issue I ran into was when I installed a new kernel onto it.
> Apparently a single developer called Megi does most of the PPP kernel
> development so I installed his kernel. Confusingly his development
> branch is called "orange-pi-5.x" and it took me some time figuring
> that out :D. Anyways, the compilation itself was straight forward, and
> the defconfig _almost_ worked well. I stole the bootloader
> configuration from PostmarketOS, rsync:ed the kernel + dtbs, and then
> changed some relevant parts in the bootloader config. Sadly the phone
> did not boot, and there was no output to be seen on the screen :/.
> After reading the wiki I found out that I could connect via serial
> through the headphone jack. I used an RS232-to-USB adapter and
> soldered it onto the internal wires of a 3.5mm cable. For output this
> did work, but when connecting TX to also get input, the output just
> got messed up and I couldn't read it. I tried to debug this and also
> seeked help from others, but ultimately couldn't get it to work.
> Luckily the only thing I needed was output because I saw in the
> bootlog that EFI stub was missing from the kernel. Enabling that and
> generating an initramfs made the phone boot!
> 
> Then I started emerging some packages, and even though I had the
> charger plugged in, the phone completely discharged after a while.
> After that the phone did not want to boot and I tried all kinds of
> things, like booting from SD card, reflashing bootloader, trying
> different cables and nothing worked ... It turned out that the
> bootloader (Tow-boot) had a bug that made the phone not charge after
> the battery as emptied, and I needed to boot it into a special mode
> holding a button with a sim card opener.
> 
> After that I set up distcc with cross compilation, and there came the
> second issue. "__aarch64_cas4_sync undefined symbol". I asked Sam and
> he said it probably was a distcc issue. Because of me not wanting to
> run into this again I tried the aarch64-gentoo-linux-musl-emerge
> wrapper instead. This worked for the most part, but I had trouble with
> copying over my phones configuration to /usr/.../etc/portage.
> I then learned about the ROOT, SYSROOT, and PORTAGE_CONFIGROOT
> variables. Toghether with sshfs I could easily emerge packages for the
> phone on my PC without using something slow like qemu-user, nice!
> I emerged a lot of packages like this and noticed that the program
> dispatch-conf did not honour the variables. This was easy to fix and I
> PR:ed it here https://github.com/gentoo/portage/pull/881.
> 
> I have also created a lot of ebuilds for Mauikit apps, these are cross
> platform KDE applications that look great on smaller devices like
> phones. https://github.com/gentoo/kde/pull/910/commits. They also work
> great on my PC.
> 
> All in all I've spent most my time this week working on the PinePhone,
> and the two following weeks I'll do a lot of testing for the KDE
> applications.