BeagleBone questions (was Re: Towards an ARM system-building script)

[Ian Lepore]

On Mon, 2012-10-29 at 09:14 -0700, Adrian Chadd wrote:
> On 29 October 2012 08:08, Alie Tan <alie at affle.com> wrote:
> > I have tried angstrom, ArchLinux and FreBSD. Only FreeBSD makes the
> > chip/board quite hot.
> >
> > Anyone have same experiece?
> 
> Are we not halting the CPU during idle ticks on ARM?
> 
> Does Linux have some extra power management code for ARM that we don't?

I'm not sure all arm SoCs we support have the ability to do this well
(or at all).  I know for sure the atmel chips can do it, and we don't
use that abillity.  We're pretty poor on power management in general in
the atmel world.  I mean poor, like we turn on all on-chip devices early
in kernel init and leave them that way, even the ones we don't have
drivers for.  A comment in the code labels that a "temporary hack" but
it's been that way for 5 years.

More directly on the OP's point, I wonder if the combo of the system not
fully booting and too much heat imply that something has gone into a
tight loop somewhere.

-- Ian