Xdsl And 128 Mb Ram, XMugen Options

[Thraxen]

I've been playing XMugen recently and noticed something. When it boots you see a black and white text screen that shows all the hardware being detected. At one point it says, "64 MB RAM with 4 MB Frame Buffer" (or something like that). Well, I actually have 128 MB of RAM in my XBox, so why does it appear that it's not being detected and is there any way to allow it to be recognized?

I think XMugen runs on a stripped down version of xDSL and uses the xromwell launcher.

[friedgold]

Is the 128MB detected in the Cromwell menu? At the top there should be some infomation about your Xbox (type of TV encoder, hard disk etc). The amount of available memory should be listed there.

[Thraxen]

Well, I'm not sure I'm ever seeing the Cromwell screen. It's set up to boot directly into XMugen without user intervention. The screen just goes balck for a few seconds and then you see what I assume it the xDSL screen. It's just a screen with some guy's picture in the upper left hand corner and then a bunch of white text on a black background showing all the hardware detection. This is the point where I see it make the comment about 64 MB of RAM. Then it just autoloads XMugen.

I could be wrong about the Cromwell launcher... I really have no experience with Linux on the Xbox. I know there was an older build that used to go to a blue screen with some icons on it. Then you have to select one fo them to start Linux and XMugen. This may be what you are talking about. But that was a while back and before I had the 128 MB upgrade.

Anyway, would you expect that screen with the white text to mention the 128 MB RAM?

[friedgold]

Well, I'm not sure I'm ever seeing the Cromwell screen. It's set up to boot directly into XMugen without user intervention. The screen just goes balck for a few seconds and then you see what I assume it the xDSL screen.

If it boots straight into XMugen there are two possibilites

• It's using a special xcromwell compile that boots straight into Linux with no delay
• It's using an alterative loader called xbeboot

xbeboot won't allow the use of 128MB (it will work but only use 64MB) so that may well be the problem. I would try downloading XCromwell and using that. You can download it from the xbox-linux sourceforge page. You may need to move a few files around depending on your current setup (linuxboot.cfg must be in the root of E:\, if you move it you'll need to update the paths in linuxboot.cfg).

This post has been edited by friedgold: Sep 4 2006, 10:35 PM

[Thraxen]

OK, the guys who work on XMugen say they aren't even sure what it is now, but it's something they started using after you suggested they try out your mini linux distro. You can see the discussion here: Link


[edit]

Crap... I opened up the XBE in a hex editor and found a line that says "Xbox Linux XBEBOOT". So it appears to indeed be xbeboot. Looks like you're screwed one way or the other with Linux on the Xbox If you use xCromwell you can't launch from a 480p dash because it just causes the Xbox to flip out and crash. But if you use xbeboot you can't use 128 MB of RAM.

I don't suppose you know of any way to get xbeboot to support the additional RAM?

This post has been edited by Thraxen: Sep 5 2006, 04:47 AM

[guybird]

Guess I should've been in on this thread from the start but hey here I am... The original XMugen Alg ported used the GentooX loader which required the user to select from Cdrom/FATX/Etherboot and then the actual Linux distro you select from a list (dependent on how many items you had in your linuxboot.cfg). After playing around with your minilinux distro, I was able to get XMugen running, although without sound and the joy2key support. I couldn't get everything working the way I wanted to, so I pretty much abandoned my efforts with minilinux. So the next best thing was to use the launcher from your distro with the XMugen setup. Your xbe launcher was much more efficient (ie didn't have to jump through hoops to get to the program) and it could be run from any partiton (didn't require the E:/linuxboot.cfg) so I started releasing XMugen with your mininlinux's launcher instead of the GentooX one.

So to piggyback on what Thraxen was saying, is XCromwell our only option? I'd really hate to go back to anything less than a "direct boot" setup, although for the 128mb users it might be worth it. Also would it allow for the user to run their XMugen setup anywhere other than E: ? That was one of the problems with the original XMugen setup as it required the "extra" files (irdloop.gz, bzImage & linuxboot.cfg) to be on the E partiton.

This post has been edited by guybird: Sep 5 2006, 07:22 AM

[friedgold]

If you use xCromwell you can't launch from a 480p dash because it just causes the Xbox to flip out and crash. But if you use xbeboot you can't use 128 MB of RAM.

That appears to be the case

I don't suppose you know of any way to get xbeboot to support the additional RAM?

I don't really know why xbeboot has a problem with 128MB, I just remeber reading it on the xbox-linux wiki. You could try to get in contact with the developers on the xbox-linux IRC channel or mailing list to see if they can enlighten you further.

I also wonder what would happen if XCromwell was chain loaded by another xbe which simply set the video mode to one which works with XCromwell (480i say) and then launched XCromwell. Would this provide a workaround?

This post has been edited by friedgold: Sep 5 2006, 02:52 PM

[friedgold]

Also I wonder what happens if you explicitly tell the kernel how much memory to use when using xbeboot. Try editing linuxboot.cfg and adding mem=124M to the append line. If that fails try mem=64M@64M or mem=60M@64M

This post has been edited by friedgold: Sep 5 2006, 04:53 PM

[Thraxen]

Also I wonder what happens if you explicitly tell the kernel how much memory to use when using xbeboot. Try editing linuxboot.cfg and adding mem=124M to the append line. If that fails try mem=64M@64M or mem=60M@64M

Just for my own knowledge, why would you enter 124M instead of 128M? Or was that a typo?

[friedgold]

Just for my own knowledge, why would you enter 124M instead of 128M? Or was that a typo?

Memory is shared with the graphics card. 124M would leave 4MB for the graphics card to use.

[Thraxen]

Also I wonder what happens if you explicitly tell the kernel how much memory to use when using xbeboot. Try editing linuxboot.cfg and adding mem=124M to the append line. If that fails try mem=64M@64M or mem=60M@64M

Well, here are the results:

mem=124M: No change
mem=64M@64M: No boot (crash)

mem=60M@64M: This one showed promise. It said "128 MB RAM with 4 MB Frame Buffer" while booting, but then it crashed. After the crash it said a whole bunch of stuff. At the top it said "Oops: 002". Then it had a whole bunch of numbers and letters in a section labeled "Call Trace". And at the bottom is said something about "Kernel Panic" and "Interrupt Handler".

I can be more specific if you would like, that's just what I remember off the top of my head. Any ideas?

[guybird]

Forgive my ignorance, but is there any other way to do this besides configuring/changing the launcher? Is there something that can be done within the Linux distro itself for this? If this is a possibility would I have to have a 128mb version and then the normal 64mb version?

[friedgold]

I can be more specific if you would like, that's just what I remember off the top of my head. Any ideas?

The other thing you can play around with from the kernel cmdline is the framebuffer size and position. Try

mem=124M video=xbox:480p,fb_mem=4M@124M

or maybe

mem=124M video=xbox:480p:fb_mem=4M@124M

(I'm not certain of the syntax)

oh, and make sure you don't have xboxfb=y or anything like that in the linuxboot.cfg

If that doesn't work maybe some additional hardware initialization is needed in the loader (although you would have thought the Xbox kernel would have done all that).

Forgive my ignorance, but is there any other way to do this besides configuring/changing the launcher? Is there something that can be done within the Linux distro itself for this? If this is a possibility would I have to have a 128mb version and then the normal 64mb version?

If the linux kernel doesn't get the right infomation from the BIOS or bootloader then the way to fix this is specify the infomation via the kernel cmdline (as above) . AFAIK this is the only way.

[Thraxen]

The other thing you can play around with from the kernel cmdline is the framebuffer size and position. Try

mem=124M video=xbox:480p,fb_mem=4M@124M

or maybe

mem=124M video=xbox:480p:fb_mem=4M@124M

oh, and make sure you don't have xboxfb=y or anything like that in the linuxboot.cfg

Well, I tried both of those with no success. If I remember correctly I think they both said "64MB of RAM".

Also, when you say to make sure the cfg file doesn't say anything about xboxfb, is that for any of these memory suggestions, or just the two you suggested? Whay does "y" mean in the "xboxfb y" line anyway?

I was thinking about trying some of these suggestions on this page: Link

What do you think about those? Any that definitely won't work with xDSL?

This post has been edited by Thraxen: Sep 10 2006, 11:23 PM