Re: (native) debian(-installer) support for fsg-3
Tomasz Chmielewski wrote:
Holger Levsen schrieb:
Hi Rod, hi Tomasz,
Martin Michlmayr (and your work!) told me to contact you, to work on
getting debian-installer support for the Freecom FSG-3. Kudos and
thanks for your great work so far!
You're welcome.
I'm a Debian developer and have in the past contributed to d-i
(nowadays more to Debian Edu, DebConf video,..), a owner of a fsg-3
since today (which is the 4th arch of mine running Debian and the 7th
which can run Debian ;) and very busy with lots of other stuff
"unfortunatly" too.
Anyway... (I haven't even yet tried Tomasz' excellent howto, but I've
looked around a bit.)
It seems the first thing we need is kernel support. Doh. :) The patch
from Rod (latest I found was
http://marc.info/?l=linux-arm-kernel&m=120183326106518&w=2 - is there
some newer, cleaner? a branch/repo/patch to pull?) which is not
included in the 2.6.25~rc6 snapshot of the debian kernels and
therefore I assume will also not be included upstream. What's the
status on this? Waiting for .25 and after that re-submitting everything?
https://svn.nslu2-linux.org/svnroot/kernel/trunk/patches will always
have the latest version of my kernel patches for the fsg3.
I'm cleaning up the patch and will submit to l-a-k again this merge
window. It should then get into .26 all things going well.
So it seems for now, we (I) will have to build our/my own arm kernel
packages, so that we then can build kernel udebs to create an arm d-i
image, which we eventually will be able to boot by pressing the reset
button and serving it via bootp.... but first we need the kernel.
Is there anything else we need in userland (or other kernel patches)
which isnt in lenny already?
We'll need flash-kernel support and userland led management.
And we will need to come up with a reliable way to write the kernel to
flash and configure redboot. BTW, is redboot the only option or could
we also use uboot or any other bootloader?
Using RedBoot and not replacing it with any other bootloader is by far
the safest way to flash FSG-3.
Even if you screw kernel flashing, you can still relatively easily
recover using a serial cable (the device needs to be opened though,
which means the warranty is gone).
If something goes wrong when you flash a new bootloader over RedBoot -
well, good luck (there is JTAG, but it's not for mere mortals I guess).
Agreed. This is the scheme we use for Debian (and all other distros) on
the NSLU2.
A nice thing on kernel-userland border is adding a custom initramfs: if
your system goes for a lunch and doesn't boot anymore (because the user
just did rm -rf /etc), one can always boot by simply inserting a
"recovery USB-stick". Basically, when kernel boots and executes
initramfs, it checks if a "recovery USB-stick" is connected, and if it
is, the system boots from there.
It would be nice to have such an option for other devices with no
keyboard, monitor etc., where Debian installer runs, not just for FSG-3.
Agreed. All of the other distros for the NSLU2 fail-safe to booting
from the internal flash to a recovery filesystem when the disk is not
available (which then allows you to fix the disk). The Debian distro is
the odd-man-out in that the debian-installer does not support this mode
of operation.
-- Rod
Reply to: