Gentoo Linux on a Lifebook P-2040

The Fujitsu Lifebook P-2040 is a Transmeta Crusoe powered laptop with an almost-full-sized keyboard, DVD/CDRW drive and an advertized battery life of over 3 hours. I wasn't looking for a desktop replacement, so in the final choice between this an AMD Athlon 4 laptop, the higher resolution screen and the extended battery life tipped the scales to the Lifebook.

I set out to install Gentoo Linux, a distribution that compiles everything from source. With the horsepower/battery life tradeoff that is the Crusoe processor, Crusoe optimizations for every binary should squeeze every last bit of speed out of the chip.

It turned out to be a more difficult problem than I hoped, but I did eventually get it working.

Thanks to John Holder for helping me figure out how to boot the iso images in the old days when Linux used to hang when trying to detect the DMA speed of the ALi chipset. If you run into some other distro that hangs there, try adding the parameters ide0=ata66 ide1=ata66 at the kernel boot prompt.

Specs

First, the specs on the laptop itself:

WinXP Stuff

The Lifebook comes installed with two partitions on the disk, an 18G partition with WindowsXP (drive C:), and a 2G partition (drive D:) that keeps some backup stuff. I needed to keep windows, so I defragmented the disk using the windows disk defragmenter, and set off to repartition the disk. That old DOS-based utility FIPS would have worked, but rather than mess with Microsoft any longer than I had to, I thought I'd just use the disk partitioner that comes with another Linux distro, Mandrake Linux.

Repartitioning

DiskDrake from Mandrake Linux has a nice graphical partition manager, and it includes the ability to resize partitions. Since I had a Mandrake 8.1 install CD sitting around, I thought that I'd just pop it in and go (after specifying the ide0=ata66 ide1=ata66 options to the kernel at boot time). I resized the Windows partition to 10G, and added some new partitions for linux:

The Lifebook stores some backup stuff on the Windows D partition, and I left that alone for now.

Gentoo Install

Gentoo is my distribution of choice now, as everything is compiled from source for full optimization for each particular hardware setup. I was particularly interested in this for the Crusoe processor -- every little bit of speed would help.

Based on what the Linux kernel uses to compile on the Crusoe, here are the CFLAGS I used:

Install Notes

Once around the boot problem, it is just the typical Gentoo install procedure. When compiling the kernel, don't forget to put the kernel boot parameters in your grub.conf.

Here are some moderately useful benchmarks that I performed using the same Gentoo version and kernel options (although it was a long time ago on a pre 1.0 Gentoo, but you should still be able to get some sense of the relative speed difference):

Longrun

The app-admin/longrun ebuild provides the longrun command to control the Transmeta CPU, but the devfs filesystem doesn't create the /dev/cpu/0/cpuid or /dev/cpu/0/msr files automatically.

I found a patch for devfs support on the linux kernel mailing list, but there seems to be some disagreement among kernel developers on how this particular patch will apply to future developments. So, the patch hasn't been included in any official kernels yet.

So, for now, create the device nodes manually:

• mkdir -p /dev/cpu/0
• mknod /dev/cpu/0/msr c 202 0
• mknod /dev/cpu/0/cpuid c 203 0

Distributed Compiling

I just discovered distcc, a distributed compiling system. See tt for a tutorial on using distcc with Gentoo. Support for the integration of distcc into Gentoo seems to be improving rapidly, but the steps to set up distcc seem to be in flux. Check on zwelch's page for the current method.

Configuration

X11

Here's my XF86Config-4 with mode timings courtesy of John Holder.

The ATI-Gatos drivers provide XVideo support, which means that programs like mplayer can play full-screen DVDs!

CD-RW Setup

Writing to CDs requires enabling a few kernel options. Importantly, IDE/ATAPI CDROM support must either be a module that is not loaded by default, or not compiled in to the kernel. If IDE/ATAPI CDROM is loaded first, the CDROM device will not be seen as SCSI.

<*> ATA/IDE/MFM/RLL support
IDE, ATA and ATAPI Block devices  --->
<M>   Include IDE/ATAPI CDROM support
<M>   SCSI emulation support

<M> SCSI support
<M>   SCSI CD-ROM support
[*]     Enable vendor-specific extensions (for SCSI CDROM)
(2) Maximum number of CDROM devices that can be loaded as modules
<M>   SCSI generic support

After recompiling the kernel, edit /boot/grub/grub.conf and add the the option hdc=ide-scsi to the end of your kernel line. For example, my entry looks like this:

kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda7 idebus=66 ide0=ata66 ide1=ata66 hdc=ide-scsi

Also, add the following lines to your /etc/modules.autoload:

sg
ide-scsi

Finally, reboot the machine. For some reason, the kernel reports 7 CDROMs are attached to my system, but only one CD is actually detected by cdrecord --scanbus

scsibus0:
        0,0,0     0) 'TOSHIBA ' 'DVD-ROM SD-R2102' '1G15' Removable CD-ROM

I burned a test iso image on a blank (high speed) CD-RW with the following command:

cdrecord -v -pad speed=8 dev=0,0,0 rescue.iso

and booted from it. To blank the entire disk, use:

cdrecord -v speed=8 dev=0,0,0 blank=all

but be aware that this takes several (er... many) minutes. The cheapo test media that I bought seems to give me an error when blanking the CD-RW, but I assume that it is due to the media itself and not any problem with the drive as I was able to write a new ISO image to the same media. I'll test this further when I get better media.

Issues

Non Working DMA (SOLVED!)

Because the kernel is compiled without ALi15x3 support, there is no DMA support for disk transfers. I assume that this is a significant performance hit, but at this point I'm just glad that the computer works.

ALi has driver information on its chipsets. According to /proc/pci, the computer has the ALi M1533 (Aladdin 4) chipset, and the M5229 IDE controller.

http://www.aliusa.com/eng/support/drivers/m1543 driver.htm has a file, linux-ide-10b3.tgz, but this is apparently an old replacement for alim15x3.c that only works with 2.2 and 2.3 kernels. UPDATE: Michael Leuchtenburg solved the DMA problems with this patch (against 2.4.18).

Benchmarks of hdparm -T -t /dev/hda:

Sound Lost After Suspend (SOLVED!)

As noted by Michael Leuchtenburg, the sound module stops piping anything through the speakers after an APM suspend and restore. The workaround is to remove and reinsert the trident module after a restore.

UPDATE: Eric Lemar solved this sound problem with this patch (against 2.4.18).

Dual Head

WinXP is able to use the VGA-out port as a separate monitor displaying an additional desktop. When I get some time, I'll be looking into attempting to get this to work under Linux.

Upgrades

Currently, the maximum upgrade to the memory is a single 128M Micro DIMM. Crucial doesn't currently have a compatible part. Kingston has the part number KFJ-FPC48/128, but none of their resellers seem to have a clue about it.

Some places that do seem to have the part in stock (at least occasionally) are Zones, Coast Memory and Fry's/Outpost.com.

I bought my 128M upgrade from Fry's.

References

• Fujitsu's homepage for the Lifebook P-2040
• John Holder's site this is the first place I found enough info to get me going
• Michael Leuchtenburg's site includes the fix for DMA access
• Good site with lots of technical info
• Discussion forum for Lifebook P series owners not Linux specific
• ALi chipset information
• Another way to boot/install Mandrake on the P-2040
• Hard disk upgrade
• ATI Rage Mobility (Mach64) DRI info