[ARMedslack] [armedslack] Installing Armed on the Sheeva NAND Flash

[brian kelley]

is there not a way to use  dfu-utilites to install the .jffs2 file to nand?


--- On Wed, 9/16/09, Stuart Winter <m-lists at biscuit.org.uk> wrote:

From: Stuart Winter <m-lists at biscuit.org.uk>
Subject: Re: [ARMedslack] [armedslack] Installing Armed on the Sheeva NAND Flash
To: armedslack at lists.polplex.co.uk
Date: Wednesday, September 16, 2009, 1:49 PM


Hi Sam

> I just booted from the ArmedSlack-12.2, sshed into it and started the setup.
> It says I need to partition HardDrives. Is there any way to install
> ArmedSlack on the internal NAND Partitions instead of an external device.

The quick answer is "you can't".
The longer answer is you *may* be able to do it, if you have a lot of
patience, enough experience and tenacity :-)

Things to note:

 1.  The installer "partition probe" doesn't look for NAND devices

 2.  Usually (from what I've read so far) you prepare a JFFS2 filesystem
     and write it to the NAND using "nandwrite" from the mtd-utils package
     then update the offsets in your u-boot boot loader config.
     I can't possibly think of a way to include this in the Slackware
     installer -- you'd have to install it on another machine using
     installpkg ROOT=/tmp/newarmmachine
     do some touchups to the configurations (since some of the package
     post-installation scripts wouldn't have run since they use chroot and
     run ARM binaries, which wouldn't work on an x86-- unless you happened
     to have a spare ARM box around to do the installation).

     A script to do the installation would be something like this:
ftp://ftp.armedslack.org/armedslack/armedslack-devtools/slackkit/sansinstaller

     You'd need to look at how to create a JFFS2 image of the result and
     write it to the NAND using "nandwrite".

The research I did so far is here - ordered in some sort of useful
fashion:

ftp://ftp.armedslack.org/armedslack/armedslack-devtools/sheevaplug/

     What also occurred to be is that you could mount the existing jffs2
     filesystem from the Slackware installer, and wipe the contents:
       mount -t jffs2 /dev/mtdblock2 /mnt/
     or something like this.   This would have to be one of the ugliest
     ways of doing it.

  3.  You'd need to use "nandwrite" to flash the kernel.

  4.  The Slackware ARM 12.2 installer does not include the nandwrite
      tools.  The -current installer includes nandwrite and
      flash_eraseall but this isn't available yet, and the installer
      wouldn't work for a v12.2 installation.

All in all, I'd say that the contents of the NAND flash are to be prepared
by the vendor; especially since it'd need a stripped down Slackware.
In advance you'd have to know which packages to include in order to
make a working bootable Slackware installation, with enough space
left over to have a useable system.



-- 
Stuart Winter
Slackware ARM: www.armedslack.org
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