Nvidia Tegra2 and Gentoo: Part one (unpack and specs)

Remember the post i wrote about ARM SoCs? Back in the day I said i wouldn’t comment on Nvidia Tegra since they said they weren’t interested on Linux. Although i updated that when they said they were working on support for it.

Well, that has changed after Google Android has developed so well. Nvidia now officially supports both Windows CE and Android. Since the Linux support is in the works, we already can see some bits, like the kernel on Nvidia’s GIT.

Fortunately i got ahold of a Nvidia Tegra 250 Developer kit, and it has arrived today. Its a pretty nice board, has Dual-Core ARM Cortex-A9 processor @ ~1GHz, 1GB of DDR2-667 RAM, 512MB NAND, audio input/output(Wolfson WM8903 L Codec), Bluetooth(CSR BC6), 802.11g Wi-Fi(Atheros 6002, so that means the ar6k driver, which isn’t on kernel upstream), 10/100Mb USB-based ethernet(SMSC LAN9514, still no Gigabit ethernet on ARMv7 except Marvell Dove), VGA, HDMI, 3 USB, 2 SD slots, 2 mini PCI-e and USIM slot. It can have a lot of optional stuff I don’t have. Anyway, you can find all the features here: http://tegradeveloper.nvidia.com/tegra/tegra-devkit-features.

On this post I’ll talk about the specifications.

Cpuinfo:

Processor : ARMv7 Processor rev 0 (v7l)
processor : 0
BogoMIPS : 1998.84

processor : 1
BogoMIPS : 1998.84

Features : swp half thumb fastmult vfp edsp thumbee vfpv3 vfpv3d16
CPU implementer : 0x41
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant : 0x1
CPU part : 0xc09
CPU revision : 0

Hardware : Tegra generic
Revision : 0000
Serial : 0000000000000000


Regarding missing NEON on features…here’s a reason: http://tegradeveloper.nvidia.com/tegra/forum/tegra-250-devkit-hw-documentation#comment-546

dmesg is here

Fore more information you can check Nvidia Tegra Forums and the Linux subforum.

One of the bad things at the moment is that it doesn’t use U-Boot, so you need to use fastboot to put the kernel on it.

On the next post i’ll provide some more info like what devices got it working, build times, and putting Gentoo on it. Meanwhile, you can check how to put Ubuntu(putting another Linux distribution is exactly the same way) written by ianr on the Tegra forums: http://tegradeveloper.nvidia.com/tegra/forum/workaround-run-ubuntu-now.

Have fun!