Posted on by Tom Barbette

Making Tilera TileMDE work on Debian 7 with Kernel 3.14

This review how to install Tilera MDE, with the slight modifications to support recent kernel and the debian environment. Our device is a TILEncore-Gx36

Edit : with MDE 4.3.2, the patch isn’t necessary anymore. You may use ./tilera-compile –gpl-license to be able to go through compilation

Install & Unpack

  • cd /opt/
  • Extract the primary tareball with sudo tar -xvf /home/tom/TileraMDE-4.3.0.178115_tilegx.tar
  • Run “unpack”  sudo ./TileraMDE-4.3.0.178115/tilegx/unpack
  • (optional instead of the last point) unpack the full tarball with sudo ./TileraMDE-4.3.0.178115/tilegx/unpack /PATH_TO/TileraMDE-4.3.0.178115_tilegx_tile_full.tar.xz
  • We’ll keep the Tilera MDE’s root on /opt/tilera, so move it there with sudo mv ./TileraMDE-4.3.0.178115/tilegx/ /opt/tilera && cd /opt/tilera

Setup environment

You’ve got to setup some environment variables. One way to do it is to add at the bottom of your ~/.bashrc file :

TILERA_ROOT=”/opt/tilera”;
PATH=”/opt/tilera/bin:$PATH”
export TILERA_ROOT PATH;

Compile and fail…

You’ve got to compile the Tilera module :

  • cd /opt/tilera/lib/modules/
  • Normally you would do “./tilepci-compile  –tilera-license”
  • Then “./tilepci intall”

But that would fail because :

  • It rely on redhat tools like chkconfig
  • It will compile a module not compatible with kernel 3.0+

You can do it anyway to extract a new folder for your current kernel, in my case “3.14-2-amd64-x86_64”

Apply the patch

So we’ll use my updated version of Sylvain Martin’s patch available here ( tom-fixes-3.14 ):

Warning : The patch is untested for many features (mostly related to /proc), but works with the stantard things you’ll want to do… Access the tilera, use tile-monitor, … It’s provided without any warranty.

  • rm -rf 3.14-2-amd64-x86_64
  • cp -rf tilera_src 3.14-2-amd64-x86_64
  • cd 3.14-2-amd64-x86_64/pcie
  • Apply the patch with patch -p1 < /PATH_TO/tom-fixes-3.14.txt
  • make INSTALL_PATH=/opt/tilera/lib/modules/3.14-2-amd64-x86_64

Install

tilepci-install will want “chkconfig” which is a redhat tool. I provide a simple wrapper here : https://github.com/tbarbette/chkconfigwrapper/blob/master/chkconfig , you just have to copy it in /usr/sbin/ and launch ./tilepci-install

 

If you have any comment or can provide any help, do not hesitate to comment !