[OFFICIAL] RaspberryPi: The 25$ PC

[pepedog]

sd card crappy, so just using for initial boot stuff, rootfs on hd now

[pepedog]

There is something wrong, all boots fine but after some disk writing errors creep in until it un mounts rootfs.
Both with sd card and hd, tried ext2 also. Hard drive makes buzzing sound, but no on trimslice, I know drive is good.
Got original (debian) card, will give that a go to see it it's hardware related. If that's ok, will try arm5 instead of oxnas. Luckily all this is quick

[vdias]

How did you get one? Pre-order? Alpha testing?

[pepedog]

Alpha testing. Kernel is sucking all my time away.

[pepedog]

OK, a first real post on raspberrypi.
I have rebuilt kernel many, many times, and tried patching later kernels.
Result is just 2.6.35.7 is ok, this was to fix a problem where large downloads froze the whole system. I did manage to fix one problem, because there is no nvmem in lan device, no mac address, this cause a random mac address and consequently never the same ip address. The fix I found not only gave it a mac address, but the device name was usb0 and now is eth0.

Anyway, I though does debian also suffer from this (with and without my kernel)? It appeared not to. alarm was so bad that even install of packages or updates was hit and miss.
Then I discovered in the debian logs it does suffer from the same problem. When you download a large file you can see the speed take a hit. The only difference the most obvious, debian appeared not to have the problem (on the console screen), alarm does. I messed with syslog-ng.conf and restarted it, compared inittab and securetty, they not stopping logging to console. However changing boot param to console=/dev/null does, and the freeze problem goes away. Only one bad side effect, when booting a tux logo appears, then no message until login prompt.
So how else can I stop messages going to console?

More news. lxde working fine, now can try other things I got (temporarily) over this problem.

[kmihelich]

Sounds like a weird kernel issue. Might be that the SMSC driver wasn't that mature on .35 as far as networking goes. For console, there really isn't a way to make logging different. If you're hooked up to say ttyS0, and logging goes there, you're going to get a smattering of messages occasionally. Same thing that you'd see hooked up to serial on any of the other boards. It's weird that it would freeze though.

How do you have things hooked up? Root filesystem on USB, SD?

My only thoughts, like above, are a kernel issue (with drivers or SoC implementation), or a hardware instability. The software we have in the repo shouldn't cause a problem, and with debian showing the same I'd have to rule it out.

[pepedog]

Somehow, debian stops console logging once init starts (or something else?)
It has been pointed out to me it's neither network or sdcard driver, but interupt storm on dwc_otg usb interface. OMAP had this, it appears that each manufacturer requires a separate workaround. But it's not (now) a super critical thing.

SD card is setup-
~100Mb fat32 lba
rest is ext3, rootfs goes here (either arm5 or arm6, but udev-oxnas needed quick), remove kernel26
fat32 gets mounted as /boot and you copy the /lib/modules over (there is a blob vchiq.ko in extra) , just modify inittab, fstab and securetty

This is interesting

Code: Select all

ls -l /boot
total 14882
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 8774156 Oct 17 16:56 30kernel.img
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root   16528 Sep  3 08:25 bootcode.bin
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root     180 Oct 18 04:44 cmdline.txt
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4835968 Oct 17 11:19 kernel.img
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root    2048 Sep  3 08:25 lib
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  314691 Sep  3 08:25 loader.bin
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1275836 Sep  3 08:25 start.elf
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root   12288 Sep  3 08:25 vlls
vlls are blobs

Modified, console=/dev/null was console=tty1 and smsc95xx.macaddr comes from patch
cat /boot/cmdline.txt
dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 dwc_otg.speed=0 console=ttyAMA0,115200 kgdboc=ttyAMA0,115200 smsc95xx.macaddr=08:00:28:00:60:01 console=/dev/null root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootfstype=ext3 rootwait

[kmihelich]

I know there are some extra flags you can set for console, Ubuntu boot.scr's on the other platforms have them set. You'll get a kernel dump for all the beginning stuff, but it will go silent after it hits init 2 or 3 I think. I don't have any of those files still hanging around, but it's a kernel command line option.

[pepedog]

Because I'm playing with X, noticed qt4-ruby not built, probably because gcc needs a patch? With regards to rpi this kills kids ruby.

[kmihelich]

kdebindings-qtruby? And yeah, I need to rebuild the toolchain for that patch to make Qt packages suck less to build and maintain.