[ARMedslack] Booting Slack 13.1 from eSata on Guruplug Server Plus

[Jim Hawkins]

On Mon, 29 Nov 2010, Stuart Winter wrote:

> On Sun, 28 Nov 2010, John O'Donnell wrote:
> 
> > You are booting from ext. It is HIDEOUSLY slow. I make a small FAT partition
> > and boot from that on the guru usb.
> 
> This must be something to do with the Guruplug.  I boot from an ext2
> partition on my sheevaplugs and openrd (which has an eSATA drive) and it
> takes a couple of seconds to load both the kernel & initrd.

There seems to be something wrong with SATA in the latest u-boot. As 
others have reported, I couldn't get it to detect the eSATA drive on my 
guruplug. If I revert the last commit to the Marvell ATA stuff it seems 
happier, although it sometimes fails to detect the drive and when it does, 
it shows the drive twice as two devices. I've just booted my kernel from 
an ext2 formatted partition on an eSATA drive on my guruplug. It's not 
slow.

When I've got some time I'll look into making it work more reliably.

Cheers,

Jim