Buffalo NAS-Central Forums

Some good news .... (but problems remain):

I have followed Andres Bach Aaen's lead in getting debian (sid) armel on a
LinkStation (LSLIVE v2), and made a replacement rootfs that boots with the
current Freelink initrd and Buffalo 2.6.16-arm1 (and my recompiled 2.6.16.57-lsp_eabi-v3_dh)
cross-compiled kernel as well as a cross-compiled 2.6.24 kernel. (I didn't yet test with the 2.6.12-arm1 kernel.)

I've take debian sid armel base, and just added jfsutils and xfstools.
(But no buffalo stuff from the Freelink rootfs yet)

There is still a problem, that doesn't seem to be kernel-related, since it also occurs with the
2.6.16 kernel that works perfectly with the freelink-rev2 rootfs.

Maybe it's because I havent yet added buffalo micon support stuff to the new rootfs (all that proc/buffalo/kernevent stuff and the like.)

SYMPTOM.

(a) the power light keeps blinking on-off-on-off-on-off .... after the boot is complete

(b) very precisely, between 300 and 330 seconds after the boot process is finished,
(and the login prompt appears on the serial terminal) the LinkStation starts beeping and hangs.


The /var/log/messages and /var/log/syslog do not give any hint about what happens to
hang the system 5 minutes after booting is complete.

I noted a similar behavior when manually booting the debian-armel installer initrd with u-boot
by placing it in /dev/sda1, loading it with ext2load ide .... then bootm
but not when loading it from a tftp server.

When I loaded manually, I stop the u-boot process at the second prompt (after the option for tftp booting has timed out, and the second 4-second interval for stopping u-boot has started). I could always get the
debian installer to start downloading stuff, but after the the 5 minutes or so were up, the system would ALWAYS hang half-way though the installation. (This NEVER happened when the uImage and initrd were loaded from the tftp server, instead of using ext2load from /dev/sda1)

If I stop the u-boot process at the second prompt, get the u-boot command line, and just wait,
the same hang also seems to occur after about 5 mins of doing nothing

Is this the "watchdog timer"???
(or a memory leak that takes 5 mins to kill the system, how can I check this?)


The good news its that it seems that this is NOT a kernel problem, so once it is sorted out by
presumably adding the right buffalo stuff to the debian-armel rootfs, we will get a working
rootfs that will allow a simple update to get a "FreeLink-armel" system (with iptables working)


Does anyone recognize what the problem I am describing is? Any hints?

actually this sounds like the watchdog timer. this happens when microevtd or the original buffalo daemon do not run.

try adding micro_evtd.

_________________
LS1 (2.6 kernel, foonas svn1062, 750 GB, UBoot 1.2) & LS Pro (FreeLink/jtymod/GenLink, changes all the time)
Thx to all donators!

Yes, add the micro_evtd. Will fix this. I have already migrated to the armel Debian but many more packages are required still. Otherwise, it works okay even on my 2.6.22-rc5. The MICON driver stuff is not required with the latest micro_evtd. It does it all now.

Add in rc6.d as K96micro_evtd
and rc0.d as K95micro_evtd

Hope this helps

_________________
LS used as PVR and streaming source

@lb_worm

If I want to make a rootfs that works with the buffalo 2.6.16 kernel (or one recompiled with extra features from Buffalo GPL sources), can I use your micro_evtd (which one?), or should I try to use the buffalo one that is included in FreeLink_rev2 (presumably with the full micon stuff?)

how much of this stuff from /usr/local is needed?

duncan_h,

The micro_evtd distributed with freelink is built for arm OABI. You'll need to compile your own armel one. You can get the source from lb_worm's user area. The micro_evtd (and some sort of init-script for it) is the only service you need; all the other buffalo functionality is either included in it or not needed.

_________________
Saving the world, one kilobyte at a time.

@lb_worm, (or anyone else)

Thanks, your micro_evtd works nicely (manual start), but what do I do to start it automatically at boot?

I'm using your initrd.
micro_evtd doesn;t start by itself.



should these both be the same (K95?)
should there also be a S95 entry in rc1.d for example?
could you be explicit?

depending on the standard runlevel (defined in /etc/inittab i think?) you either need /etc/rc2.d/S95micro_evtd or /etc/rc3.d/S95micro_evtd (symlinks to /etc/init.d/micro_evtd)

_________________
LS1 (2.6 kernel, foonas svn1062, 750 GB, UBoot 1.2) & LS Pro (FreeLink/jtymod/GenLink, changes all the time)
Thx to all donators!

I will dig out all the other simlinks that I use and let you know.

The micro_evtd should start at boot as it needs to issue a boot complete to the MICRO. There have been a number of other changes since the release on the uploads area but this one will get you going. I can build for EABI also if required otherwise I have been using a static build to get around these issues. The OABI load will still run under an EABI/OABI kernel as a static build.

_________________
LS used as PVR and streaming source

duncan_h your timing is fantastic
My plan was to scratch my TS Pro VII tomorrow following Andres Bach Aaen's recipee for installing debian. No dobut I'll get the same issues as you are facing...

Please keep my posted on your progress so we can have the TS running Freelink as well. Let me know if there's anything I can help with!

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 238 May 8 2006 imhere.sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root staff 22 Nov 25 2006 initsw.sh
-rwxr--r-- 1 root staff 1614 Nov 26 2006 kernelmon_exec.sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 307 Jan 7 2007 lcd_error_man.sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 22 Apr 24 2006 set_time.sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 107 Apr 28 2006 shutdown.sh

./lib:
total 56
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root staff 28644 Oct 2 2006 libbuffalo_bin.a
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root staff 22601 Oct 2 2006 libbuffalo_bin.so
./sbin:
total 44
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root staff 67 Nov 26 2006 diskmon
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root staff 68 Nov 26 2006 errormon
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root staff 309 Jan 5 2007 kernelmon
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root staff 68 Nov 26 2006 miconapl
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root staff 6620 Jan 8 2007 micro_evtd


-rwxr-xr-x 1 root staff 12964 Oct 13 2006 mkimage
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root staff 128 Dec 27 2006 mkinitrd

The ones in red are not required.

K95micro_evtd in rc0.d
S19micro_evtd in rc2.d
K96micro_evtd in rc6.d

are all the symlinks that you need.

PS: I can post an armel Freelink LS ready image if anyone is interested?

_________________
LS used as PVR and streaming source

Please do.
I will then make the changes needed for a TS image so we can get that flying as well.

@lb-worm

Sounds good. Is it reasonable to run it with the (recompiled) 2.6.16 Buffalo GPL kernel,
to keep issues of newer kernels, network performance, etc. separate from conversion to armel
issues. (as well as lenny/sid debian issues, I've already seem how "unstable" is not as easy to deal with
as etch)

The ARMel repo's for Debian only went live last week. Many packages are still broken and in-build. I do not think that you will have many problems mixing kernel's to be honest. More with the distribution and trying to port at such an early stage. Even my build has many issues. Runs though.

_________________
LS used as PVR and streaming source

I got the ADS installation debian installation initrd to work, and updated to the
latest armel repo. seems to work, some stuff missing in sid (like tzconfig, latest build of
nfs-utils, etc). Didn't get the setup from debootstrap to boot successfully, so I stuck
with the ADS one (which calls itself "lenny/sid"). Works fine with buffalo GPL 2.6.16
rebuild.

@lb-worm
your micro_evtd works nicely (I built it on armel): I guess a deb-style
package (install the rc*.d symlinks too) would be the way to go for general users.

duncan_h,

Seems that as of recently the official Debian mirrors are carrying armel binaries. I've removed all lines from my sources.list except ftp.us.debian.org, and everything is happy so far.

I at one time put together a .deb for the original micro_evtd; if there is interest I will make one available of the new version.

_________________
Saving the world, one kilobyte at a time.