Bug#510271: installation-report: Lenny on a Slug - eventual success after a few tries and some fixups
* Rick Thomas <rbthomas55@pobox.com> [2009-01-13 10:05]:
>> Sorry, I was wrong here. Yeah, this sounds like an interesting
>> approach.
>
> I don't think regenerating the image should be necessary. If "--payload"
Yes, as I said, I was wrong. You can just specify --payload with an
existing image when uploading to the NSLU2.
> can be used along with the image you provide, then there could be code in
> the image that looks to see if the "payload" area has something that looks
> like a preseed (maybe a "magic number" or checksum or timestamp or
> something else to be reasonably sure we're not being fooled by random data
> or by stuff left-over from the last d-i.) If there is, it can use it, if
> not, it can ignore it.
>
> Or am I missing something? I don't know much about the internals of the
> upslug2 process, so I'm sure there's plenty I could be missing. Is there
> documentation beyond the upslug2 man page I could look at? In particular,
> I gather that the program on the slug end of the upslug2 process is called
> "redboot" -- is that correct? Is there a Linksys manual or technical
> paper describing redboot?
The boot loader on the NSLU2 is RedBoot, but I don't think this
payload has anything to do with RedBoot per se. I think the payload
features simply writes the data to a location in flash that isn't used
for anything.
But I don't know any details myself about this feature. I've copied
Rod Whitby who should be able to point to more documentation (if it
exists) or give us more information.
I should mention again, though, that while this feature might be nice
to have, I'm personally not interested in working on it (because there
are so many other things on my TODO list from which more people will
benefit than from this feature).
--
Martin Michlmayr
http://www.cyrius.com/
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