Hacking your GoFlex Home, #1 Build your KERNEL

It’s been quite sometime that I’ve got my GoFlex Home now, and it’s only recently that I’ve received my RS232 Serial USB UART Adapter.
The pin connections are simple and easy, I’ll post that as well. As I’ve already got Gentoo Linux running on the Marvell SoC, I was still using the Archlinux ARM kernel, for lack of better options. Building the kernel seemed to be a simple task, but apparently, if you have used the Archlinux ARM kernel config as a base to build your own, you won’t see the kernel debug messages, you only see the warnings, and those are few.

To get going:
Download the kernel sources, I’ve got a successful build with vanilla sources(patched with archlinuxarm patches) 3.1.10
After patching the kernel, you can quickly generate the default config, by

# make kirkwood_defconfig

That would generate the default configuration, then you could configure it via menuconfig, and set the required options.
I’ve attached my present kernel configuration, you could use that as a base, as it took me quite a while to get the kernel working right. This kernel does not support an initrd, as I don’t think embedded devices should need one. So, if your kernel says that it can’t mount the VFS, it’s likely that your U-boot is giving it an initrd to use, and that surprisingly, took me quite a while to figure out.

Goodluck hacking your GoFlex :)