Re: Task list for Debian on the QNAP Turbostation
Hi,
I can help for three things (at least):
* Have a wiki up (but maybe you have one) so everybody (or some people)
can share ideas and the like about this todo list
* Have some info about the MAC address stuff, as I'm getting in touch with
QNAP for the developement of a Finder for Linux. (From last mail on
friday, they asked me about what I will need, sources, protocol, svn,
private forum to exchange with the other guy), so this looks like they
are OK.
Though, I asked them about having it all under GPL and
they did not answer this part yet. (Hope its OK this way for them, wich
is better for debian, the other way being closed source, but for money.)
* and then, give us the possibility to use the installer on an
uninstalled NAS
On Sun, Mar 09, 2008 at 11:20:56PM +0100, Martin Michlmayr wrote:
> 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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