Re: U-Boot on QNAP TS-421
On Wed, 2014-02-12 at 13:34 +0000, Gordan Bobic wrote:
> On 2014-02-12 13:03, Ian Campbell wrote:
> > On Wed, 2014-02-12 at 12:26 +0000, Gordan Bobic wrote:
> >> As far as I can tell, the standard Debian install for
> >> the QNAP NAS-es also runs from on-board NAND and thus
> >> runs with the default u-boot parameters.
> >
> > This is not the case, Debian will be installed to the SATA disk.
> > Between
> > the installer and flash-kernel things are arranged such that the kernel
> > +initrd in the flash do the right things to boot Debian from the disk.
> >
> > This does not need any u-boot hackery and works with the defaults.
>
> Oh, I see. So the initrd makes sure the correct rootfs is
> mounted.
Yes.
> >> What I really want to do is be able to switch
> >> (persistently) between booting the stock firmware
> >> from NAND and a full fat Linux distro from SATA
> >> by only changing the root= kernel boot parameter
> >> (in u-boot bootargs), and use the stock kernel
> >> for both.
> >
> > This might be a bit trickier, but I'm afraid I expect you are the first
> > to have such a requirement.
>
> It's not a requirement per se - it's more a case of
> leaving options open with minimum possible changes.
>
> Is there somewhere I can download just the Debian
> kernel and initrd blobs to flash to NAND without
> installing the whole distro?
At least the initrd is generated on the fly, by mkinitramfs. The kernel
you ought to be able to extract from the kernel package.
Or having installed Debian you can take a copy of the mtd partitions,
along the lines of the recovery process documented on Martin's website.
In fact having a copy of those is strongly recommended for recovery
purposes anyway.
Ian.
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