Task list for Debian on the QNAP Turbostation
This mail is to coordinate our activities to get support for QNAP
Turbostation devices based on an Orion chip (TS-109, TS-209, TS-409)
into Debian. I'll review the current status and, more importantly,
describe the outstanding tasks.
Here's the current status:
- TS-109 and TS-209 will be pretty much fully supported in 2.6.25.
There's an external program, called piccontrol, to control the LED
and fan. This program is very preliminary and needs more work.
Most of this work has been done by Byron Bradley. There's no
support for the TS-409 currently, but I believe it will be quite
similar to TS-209 support.
- I have added an "orion" flavour to the Debian kernel that will
work on TS-109/TS-209.
- flash-kernel supports the TS-109/TS-209.
- oldsys-preseed mostly supports the TS-109/TS-209.
- Most of debian-installer knows about the "orion" platform (i.e.
partman, base-install).
Here's what needs to be done, roughly in order of importance:
- Package u-boot: we need the mkimage program from u-boot because
u-boot expects the kernel and ramdisk to have a special u-boot
header that mkimage generates. My approach was simply to package
mkimage only (e.g. by taking https://dev.openwrt.org/browser/trunk/tools/mkimage
and fixing the Makefile), but joeyh indicated some interest in
packaging all of u-boot. Joey, what's the status of this?
- Set the MAC address: the QNAP devices have a bogus MAC address
in the u-boot config and the real MAC address is stored in a
file on a flash partition with ext2. My original idea was to
set the MAC address in debian-installer. Frans has investigated
this a bit and busybox doesn't have support for this at the
moment. Someone should either talk to busybox upstream, or we
have to figure out a different solution. I'm wondering whether
we could simply read the MAC address and then fix the u-boot
config before starting the installer. Unfortunately, there's
apparently no command to do that, so we'd have to use something
like sed. I haven't had a chance to test this yet, though.
Frans, can you see whether this would be a good option.
- Set some initramfs-tools settings: I think that the default
of MODULES=most is not appropriate for NAS devices. We should
probably use MODULES=dep on the QNAP; we need a way to easily
change setting based on the device you're running. Frans, can
you look into this?
- Get persistent disk naming: well known issue without solution. :(
- Package piccontrol: this is used to control the LED and fan.
See http://qnap.nas-central.org/index.php/PIC_Control_Software
- Figure out a good way to install Debian without having to install
the QNAP firmware first. I have some ideas, and Frans found that
telnet is enabled when the firmware is not installed; so this
would give us a way in. I will try to take a look unless someone
else volunteers.
- Add kernel udebs to the installer. This requires us to move to
2.6.25 first. I'll add udebs when it's time to move to 2.6.25.
- Generate orion images in debian-installer that work on QNAP
TS-x09. We first need to move to 2.6.25.
- Create a web site: I'm (slowly) working on this.
- Possibly put SSH in the ramdisk as a rescue option. Joey?
- Add TS-409 kernel support.
- Anything else I forgot?
--
Martin Michlmayr
http://www.cyrius.com/
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