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

[cat@catcream.org]

Okay I got you, sure! 



Aug 8, 2022, 13:18 by ebo@sandien.com:

> When you get the draft of step-by-step doc, sit down and do a clean install and follow the step-by-step to verify that it works as documented.  Maybe if you have someone that can beta test things, they can verify the final docs.
>
> Anyway, that is all I meant.
>
>  EBo --
>
>
> On Aug 8 2022 6:58 AM, cat@catcream.org wrote:
>
>> Yes! I have week 12 fully dedicated to writing documentation actually.
>> I have written some notes but I'll also use my daily blogs to remind
>> me of what to write about :)
>>
>> What do you mean by "and verification that they are really up to
>> date", like so the older docs are really up to date? For the PinePhone
>> Pro in particular I'd like to do something like this
>> https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/PinePhone but with a lot more
>> information.
>>
>>
>>
>> Aug 8, 2022, 02:33 by 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.
>>>>