Re: Debian on Synology Armada 370/XP NAS boxes
On Sat, 2014-05-17 at 00:17 +0200, Alexander Pohl wrote:
> > With the flash-kernel method there should be no need to reflash grub,
> > unless the factory one is horribly broken somehow.
> I think that is the case here (factory image is horribly broken) as I am
> not able to get the kernel to boot (see my other post).
It would be very unusual for a u-boot to be so broken that it couldn't
bootm with an appended DTB (assuming it boots the factory kernel OK).
Things to check:
* Appending the correct DTB for the platform?
* Using the correct load address to mkimage?
* Loading the resulting uImage at a good address?
* Setting bootargs correctly? (in particular console=)
The correct load address for mkimage can be obtained by grabbing the
factory kernel and running mkimage -l on it. The rest should be easy to
figure out by looking at the factory environment with printenv (feel
free to post it if you want advice).
> The flash is only 64 Mbit. Is that too small to fit a Debian kernel and
> initrd?
That's 8M, should be OK, I think. Looking at a random armhf system the
3.10 kernel was 2.2M and had a 5.6M initrd, and that's with modules=most
rather than modules=dep.
> That is also the reason why I like the idea of chain loading
> another boot loader such as grub, which is for sure small enough to fit
> into the flash.
This is a lovely idea in theory, but it will take a lot of work upstream
to make it actually work in practice (I know, I've tried, it's a
nightmare).
Ian.
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