Re: Debian on Synology Armada 370/XP NAS boxes
On Wed, 2014-05-14 at 19:16 +0200, Alexander Pohl wrote:
> Ideally, one would have to supply an u-boot version which has the Grub
> API enabled and then to chain load Grub from there,
Ideally perhaps but in reality there are various issues with running
grub on u-boot (the u-boot API is pretty broken, grub is not relocatable
etc), I at least have given up on that path.
> which in turns loads Debian initramfs and kernel images. This way
> keeping the system up to date with newer kernels would be easy as this
> is all handled by Grub.
The current tool we have for doing this is "flash-kernel". Adding
support should just be a case of figuring out the correct stanza for the
machine. It supports various modes, including copying kernel+flash to
dedicated flash partitions (either raw or with a filesystem), writing a
boot.scr, appending a device-tree as necessary etc. It should be
possible to integrate with the factory u-boot.
Even if you are keen to go the grub route I would suggest getting things
working via flash-kernel first to enable these systems to be used, and
then treat the grub thing as a future thing.
u-boot folks seem to be standardising on parsing the extlinux/syslinux
config file format for this stuff, I might take a look at whether the
extlinux-update script can be made available on ARM at some point (it's
currently in an x86 only package).
> The problem for development and testing I see is that the u-boot image
> supplied by Synology does not have the Grub API enabled, so one has to
> flash a new version of u-boot first, which is targeted for the
> specific platform. The bootrom of the DS213j does not support the uart
> boot method implemented in kwboot, so if the update of the u-boot
> image fails one is left with a bricked unit. One could try to program
> the SPI flash in-circuit, but this might not work.
With the flash-kernel method there should be no need to reflash grub,
unless the factory one is horribly broken somehow.
> Could you please elaborate on the reasons why Synology boxes are not
> yet supported by the Debian installer images and where the problems
> are to implement support in the future.
AFAIK there are none. These things happen when interested people send
patches.
Ian.
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