Arch on Iomega HMNHD Cloud Edition

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Re: Arch on Iomega HMNHD Cloud Edition

Postby solo » Sun Nov 20, 2011 9:28 pm

It works. I'm booting from an ancient 160GB spare drive to a ssh'able system. I dunno what was wrong yesterday evening. Maybe my board is somewhat flakey or I should have soldered the serial cable together instead of using duct tape. :oops:

Thanks for the support so far! The next steps would be

1. change the uboot parameter to boot directly from sda instead of raid
2. use ALARM rootfs
3. use a custom kernel image (do you have any?)
4. clock the chip to it's native 750Mhz (or higher?)
5. recompile system with arm11 mpcore optimization

Anything to think of?

Ciao,

solo
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Re: Arch on Iomega HMNHD Cloud Edition

Postby WarheadsSE » Sun Nov 20, 2011 9:33 pm

The custom kernel image is available, yes, in the rootfs package.

I use ide0:1 and write the kernel, then what is ide0:2 is my rootfs (aka, sda2)

That way I can just write the kernel image directly to /dev/sda1


.. recompiling the entire system is going to take forever, be a pain in your *****, and likely not be worth the exhaustion
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Re: Arch on Iomega HMNHD Cloud Edition

Postby solo » Sun Nov 20, 2011 9:43 pm

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I') use ide0:1 and write the kernel, then what is ide0:2 is my rootfs (aka, sda2)

That way I can just write the kernel image directly to /dev/sda1

Not sure, what exactly you mean with this... You're talking about "HMNHD without Cloud Edition"? Doesn't the kernel image have to sit on a specific offset on the HD?

I think I'll have to find out the correct blocknumber where the stock kernel image starts, replace that and hope there are no length settings or checksums somewhere in u-boot.

How did you manage to overclock the chip?

Ciao,

solo
Last edited by solo on Sun Nov 20, 2011 9:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Arch on Iomega HMNHD Cloud Edition

Postby WarheadsSE » Sun Nov 20, 2011 10:11 pm

As I keep saying, I have access to the PLX sources, though NDA.

I am referring to the HMCE, but the only things it really needs are stage1 & uboot. After that, the setup is up to you.
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Re: Arch on Iomega HMNHD Cloud Edition

Postby solo » Mon Nov 21, 2011 9:13 pm

In riddles you speak, my friend. Could you explain the kernel change a little further, u-boot commands etc... ?

Ciao,

solo
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Re: Arch on Iomega HMNHD Cloud Edition

Postby WarheadsSE » Mon Nov 21, 2011 9:52 pm

Lets do this:
At the moment, I can only direct you on how to do this while removing the disk from the HMCE. And I need to package up a clean tidbits. Reference here: viewtopic.php?f=29&t=1172&start=50

I will work on cleaning it up.
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Re: Arch on Iomega HMNHD Cloud Edition

Postby solo » Sun Nov 27, 2011 7:18 pm

Okay, ArchLinux running on my Iomega HMNHDCD. :geek:

It was a lot of work, mostly trial & error - not because big obstacles, but small edges everywhere. I'll sum up a few of them.

The board init with serial attached is flakey. My board boots approximately one out of five times with my CA-42 attached. The other four times it hangs silently. It helps to power on with serial detached, then quickly connecting it. You don't have to wait until stage1 has booted. Just a moment after poweron, even before the disk has completely spun up, is enough. That way you get the complete output. I wish I would have found out this earlier...

The arch oxnas kernels don't work for me. The pci-kernel hangs immediately after "booting the kernel". The nopci-kernel hangs later in the boot process looking for some NAND stuff that probably isn't there on hmnhdce: http://pastebin.com/nvZZ53hC. So I'm using the iomega-2.6.31.14 kernel. I saved the modules tree from the original rootfs and copied that into arch. Some modules seem missing - oxnas-led beeing the first one I noticed. Nothing important though, it works fine as far as I can see.

The network chip needs a complete up-down-cycle before picking up links properly. The standard arch network init did never bring the connection up while booting. Yet it was enough to simply "rc.d restart network" on serial connection to make it work. I had this in my rc.local at first. By comparing the boot logs I found out that lines 265 and 266 from the stock firmware boot http://pastebin.com/6G3JypMe were missing in archs boot. I narrowed it down to simply:
$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', '--- a/rc.d/set-oxnas-mac
+++ b/rc.d/set-oxnas-mac
@@ -6,19 +6,20 @@ case "$1" in
start)
stat_busy 'Setting MAC address'
#clear LED blinker
modprobe oxnas-led
proled amber
# if not run, will default to '00:31:0e:00:00:01'
MAC_ADDR=`cat /usr/local/mac_addr`
ifconfig eth0 down
if ifconfig eth0 hw ether $MAC_ADDR
then
proled green
ifconfig eth0 up
+ ifconfig eth0 down
stat_done
- ifconfig eth0 up
+ #ifconfig eth0 up
else') As this is oxnas specific, I think that script is a good place for this. That way nothing has to be changed in arch's network stuff. Maybe you want to add it to the images. It can't hurt and I read about network problems of other users.

That's it. I'm still fighting with samba to make it work as PDC. But that is not arch specific. Now I also know a lot of things I didn't want to know. The usual linux story... It's always the same. ;) But without your work I wouldn't be there at all - thank you, WHSE!

Ciao,

solo
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Re: Arch on Iomega HMNHD Cloud Edition

Postby WarheadsSE » Sun Nov 27, 2011 7:31 pm

Congrats! I'm glad to see you got it working.

There are definitely some differences yes, and the up/down of the network is an in/out problem for some, and why you often see me saying "try doubling the network entry in the daemons line". Not sure why. I half-expected the kernel problem, to be honest, because there is no PCIe or NAND logic on the HMCE, so glad to hear you got it sorted out, and that it works with our binaries out of the box.

The serial causing flaky behavior is a bit of a surprise, to be honest, as I have never had any issues with mine.
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