Updating the kernel on Fedora 17 for Raspberry Pi

I've been playing around with Fedora 17 on the Raspberry Pi for a while.  There are excellent nightly images available from http://scotland.proximity.on.ca/arm-nightlies/, but these have an old version of the 3.1.9 Raspberry Pi kernel.

I have had a few problems with this old kernel including:

• My fast (8 GB SanDisk Extreme Pro (class 10, 95 MB/s)) SD cards don't work - and the class 4 cards are just too slow for certain jobs.
• Lots of these sort of errors:
  DEBUG_ timer_callback:: Timer hc timer callback
  WARN:: hc_xfer_timeout:1740: hc_xfer_timeout: timeout on channel 5
  WARN:: hc_xfer_timeout:1742 start_hcchar_val 0x00d88a00
• Lots of these kind of errors when the root partition is on a class 4 card:
  mcc0: note - long write synce 1350000ns - 13603 its.

So tonight I decided to upgrade the kernel following the instructions from this thread http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=51&t=8250 (post dated 2012-06-13 9:37am).

So far this has worked brilliantly.  The errors are gone and I can use my fast SD cards now.

Kamailio for Raspberry Pi

I have recently build some RPMs of Kamailio 3.3.0-pre3 (as of yesterday) including for the Raspberry Pi (running Fedora 17).

I haven't done much testing with these yet, but if anyone wants to try them I have put them in my yum repo: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9300853/yum/index.html

Air Video Server for Linux on Fedora 17

One of the things that stopped working when I upgraded to Fedora 17 was Air Video Server for Linux.  Fortunately, this is a quick fix - I needed to rebuild FFMpeg (step 4 in my previous procedure).

Unfortunately, the version of FFMpeg needed for Air Video Server Linux doesn't compile on Fedora 17 - but this was easy to fix.  So, if you are upgrading to Fedora 17 simply rebuild and install FFMpeg (step 4 in my previous procedure) following the instructions below.  If you have a new installation of Fedora 17 my previous procedure will mostly work but you should replace step 4 with the instructions below.


tar jxvf ffmpeg-for-2.4.5-beta6.tar.bz2
cd ffmpeg/libavcodec/x86
rm h264_qpel_mmx.c
wget http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9300853/AirVideoLinux-alpha6/h264_qpel_mmx.c
cd ../..
./configure --enable-pthreads --disable-shared --enable-static \
  --enable-gpl --enable-libx264 --enable-libmp3lame
make all
[sudo] make install
cd ..


Updated: Mon 4 Jun 2012 00:04

Upgrading to Fedora 17

I upgraded both of my Fedora 16 systems to Fedora 17 today.  I was, unfortunately, affected by four similar, but separate, grub2 bugs.  For those who don't know, grub2 is the bootloader used in Fedora and - if it goes badly wrong you can end up with a system that won't boot.

The four problems I had were:

1. Whenever a new kernel is installed I get the error: "grubby fatal error: unable to find a suitable template"
2. When the computer boots grub2 reports "error: file '/boot/grub2/locale/en.mo.gz' not found"
3. When the computer boots I get a "signal out of range" error on my monitor, and on fixing this
4. grub2 prints "error: file not found" three times after starting to boot

The fix to these issues is simple:

# vim /etc/default/grub (add the line GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT=console to the end of the file)

# grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
# grub2-install /dev/sda (replace /dev/sda with the device your bootloader is installed on)

If (like me) you are paranoid you can check the fixes by reinstalling the kernel (as long as you haven't restarted your machine and are still running the old kernel) and making sure there are no errors reported:

# yum reinstall kernel


Updated: Sun 3 Jun 2012 11:53