[armedslack] I think I am missing something?

[Thierry MERLE]

On Mon, 14 Sep 2009 19:54:41 +0100 (BST)
Stuart Winter <m-lists at biscuit.org.uk> wrote:

> 
> > The kernel patches come in mainline, but in linux-next before mainline:
> > http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/next/linux-next.git;a=commitdiff;h=7eeae54c68e91c46ec170e764d1cceac81f35969
> > I think the fork is more to have a working kernel than to have a real fork of linux.
> 
> ah I didn't know it'd got into linux-next.
> 
> I know the fork isn't a fork of Linux, but I thought it was a fork of
> Marvell's own git tree.
> 
> I'm still not sure what's going on with it (I might pose the question on
> the openrd google group) though, but the google group is linked from
> www.open-rd.org, so perhaps the support is just being handled by someone
> else.
> 
ah, OK. Hope they will continue to put things in the mainline kernel.

> > P.S.: I received by SP, I will play with flashing a kernel and initrd.
> 
> Flashing to the NAND?
> 
Yes, replacing the Ubuntu stuff.
> This script shows how to flash the kernel to the NAND -- it's two commands
> - 1 to erase and the next to flash.
> http://sheeva.with-linux.com/sheeva/README-2.6.30.5
> 
Thanks, I was recompiling the 2.6.30 kernel on my NSLU2, this will speedup the thing :)
 
> When I last played with this, I thought that even if we can get the initrd
> into the flash, how do we update the u-boot boot arguments with the
> offsets without the user nothing down the values & doing it by hand?
> I was wondering if there's a way of updating the u-boot parameters from
> inside Linux.
Yes there is a way, but by raw editing the flash (the first 1MB flash bank), something that can brick your SP (I already bricked my SP; reverting to factory default uboot is quite easy).
Well, I will do that configuration modification in a second time.
My first aim is to reproduce the same behavior than on my NSLU2 that has its kernel and initrd in flash that allows to detect and boot safely on a USB device.
I see 2 mtd partitions declared:
mtd0: 00400000 00020000 "uImage"
mtd1: 1fb00000 00020000 "rootfs"
I will put the kernel in "mtd0", and my initrd in "mtd1".
On a second time I will resize mtd1 to put the rootfs in flash.

For a standard user, providing a binary image he can flash uImage, initrd and rootfs could be an easy solution.

Thierry