Re: Status of Debian on QNAP
On Thu, Nov 26, 2020 at 4:34 AM Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Nov 20, 2020 at 1:36 PM Arnd Bergmann wrote:
>
> > The main question for what would happen with the armel port
> > I think is what kernel to ship. When the marvell kernel gets
> > retired, the only kernel package left would be the raspberrypi
> > variant, and that is a bit silly given that it has its own raspbian
> > armhf port that is much more suitable for that specific
> > hardware.
>
> Is installing a bootloader into the kernel partition and then loading
> the kernel from the rootfs an option to avoid having to drop kernel
> support for armel devices?
This is technically a possibility, but it does require a boot loader
with drivers for that platform and someone to package it.
On an individual machine, I would probably pick a simpler
option, either building a custom kernel with fewer features
enabled to fit it into the normal kernel partition of the flash,
or rearranging the partitions on the device. E.g. in the
ts219.dtsi, I see this layout:
m25p128@0 {
#address-cells = <1>;
#size-cells = <1>;
compatible = "m25p128", "jedec,spi-nor";
reg = <0>;
spi-max-frequency = <20000000>;
mode = <0>;
partition@0 {
reg = <0x00000000 0x00080000>;
label = "U-Boot";
};
partition@40000 {
reg = <0x00080000 0x00040000>;
label = "U-Boot Config";
};
partition@c0000 {
reg = <0x000c0000 0x00140000>;
label = "NAS Config";
};
partition@200000 {
reg = <0x00200000 0x00200000>;
label = "Kernel";
};
partition@400000 {
reg = <0x00400000 0x00900000>;
label = "RootFS1";
};
partition@d00000 {
reg = <0x00d00000 0x00300000>;
label = "RootFS2";
};
};
This is 2MB for Kernel, 9MB for RootFS1 and 3MB for RootFS2.
As Martin describes on
https://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/qnap/ts-219/troubleshooting/
the RootFS1 partition is used for initramfs, not sure what the third
one is for (device tree?). Possibly the three partitions could be
combined into one partition for kernel+initramfs with a combined
14MB, or maybe the system can be made to boot without an
initramfs.
Arnd
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