What are the most stable devices for debian ARM(arm64, armhf, armel)?

So not all ARM Nas's are stable for debian. What are some good choices? I am thinking about Seagate Personal Cloud (1 bay only), which is supported by debian. But do all stuff work? For example, poweroff, reboot, wake on lan, CPU energy saving modes? What would be a good choice?

My number one is: Iomega PX4-300D. Ethernets work, wake on lan works. Power draw is around 15W at idle. This is not ARM, it's actually intel atom x86. But very easy. 1GB NAND flash inside. Only, you could put an alpine linux inside, I am using it like that actually. I put it using virtualbox, installing an alpine linux as 955MB(exactly that), 100MB boot, rest is for rootfs. Then turn that vdi file to img, then boot another linux HDD inside that NAS(it actually has a very easy BIOS, and serial console) and select it, from there burn that img file.

I could actually share a guide about it.

I ported an Asustor AS-1002T before, but ethernet wasn't stable. It would work for 20 minutes, then go down. It would be because I couldn't find a good dtb file, I used a Linksys's WRT1200AC's DTB file. That was the only working file with ethernet. I followed this guide exactly: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Linksys/WRT1200AC
But, the original firmware was an img file. I extracted them, there were two dtb files AS10XT.dtb and AS10XTE.dtb files. I appended those dtb files with cat, but they booted debian installer, but no ethernet. I don't know why those dtb files didn't work... I extracted them via binwalk command. Can someone care to explain? The NAS uses some 3.10 kernel btw, originally. Maybe that's why?



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 06/19/2024 07:01PM by ahlaklisuvari.

> So not all ARM Nas's are stable for debian. What
> are some good choices? I am thinking about Seagate
> Personal Cloud (1 bay only), which is supported by
> debian. But do all stuff work? For example,
> poweroff, reboot, wake on lan? What would be a
> good choice?

Most stable, best cost/performance ratio 1-bay NAS enclosure: Synology DS116 (Armada 385, armhf, dual core, 1GB RAM) ... If you can find it.
Honorable mentioned; 2-by NAS enclosure: Thecus N250 (Armada 385, armhf, dual core, 1GB RAM).

Next in the Kirwood SoC (armel) family, less performance, but stable: 2-bay NAS enclosure: Zyxel NSA325 v2 (single core 512MB RAM)
Equally in the Kirwood SoC family: Dell Kace M300 (single core 2GB RAM). This needs some tinkering to attach SATA SSD/HDD.


> But, the original firmware was an img file. I
> extracted them,
> there were two dtb files
> AS10XT.dtb and AS10XTE.dtb files. I appended those
> dtb files with cat, but they booted debian
> installer, but no ethernet. I don't know why those
> dtb files didn't work...

Post these DTB files here (attach to your post) and I'll take a look.

-bodhi
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Here they are Bodhi. Hope this helps.

So I've decompiled these 2 DTB files. Please see attached their DTS files.

1. Are there 2 Ethernet ports on this box? Both DTS specified

ethernet@70000 {
                                compatible = "marvell,neta";
                                reg = <0x70000 0x4000>;
                                interrupts-extended = <0x06 0x08>;
                                clocks = <0x05 0x04>;
                                tx-csum-limit = <0x2648>;
                                status = "okay";
                                mac-address = [00 50 43 02 02 01];
                                eth,port-num = <0x00>;
                                eth,port-mtu = <0x5dc>;
                                phy = <0x07>;
                                phy-mode = "rgmii";
                        };

                        ethernet@30000 {
                                compatible = "marvell,neta";
                                reg = <0x30000 0x4000>;
                                interrupts-extended = <0x06 0x0a>;
                                clocks = <0x05 0x03>;
                                tx-csum-limit = <0x800>;
                                status = "disabled";
                                mac-address = [00 50 43 02 02 02];
                                eth,port-num = <0x01>;
                                eth,port-mtu = <0x5dc>;
                        };

                        ethernet@34000 {
                                compatible = "marvell,neta";
                                reg = <0x34000 0x4000>;
                                interrupts-extended = <0x06 0x0c>;
                                clocks = <0x05 0x02>;
                                tx-csum-limit = <0x800>;
                                status = "okay";
                                mac-address = [00 50 43 02 02 03];
                                eth,port-num = <0x02>;
                                eth,port-mtu = <0x5dc>;
                                phy = <0x08>;
                                phy-mode = "sgmii";
                        };

So if there are 2 ports, try

a. Plug the Ethernet cable to the other port.
b. With serial console connected, boot into Debian, and post

dmesg
ifconfig -a

You might see which Ethernet port is active. And also errors in the Ethernet PHY (if it cannot be initialized).

If there is only one Ethernet port, then the 2nd should be disabled in the DTS. And then recompile the DTS.

2. There are quite a few errors when I decompiled the DTB. These DTBs are quite old, and a lot of bindings have changed in mainline. They might or might not affect the Ethernet bring up.

-bodhi
===========================
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There is definitely only one ethernet port on this. Not two. So both of those files have 2 ethernets?

When I boot the installer with that dtb file, it asks me it can't find the ethernet driver, and makes me choose an etherenet driver. I also selected that "mvneta" driver once, on both dtb files. I appended each of them to vmlinuz, nothing. Still it didn't work.

Only thing worked was debian's wrt1200ac-caiman.dtb file. It worked, dunno how.

Also, u-boot gave me some warnings and errors about phy's. I have a very detailed video recording of u-boot. I think it said wrong phy register or something. I'll post when I got home.

But, I actually bricked that device by doing a mistake. I overwritten u-boot because of damn chatgpt. I knew it would do some bad thing, but stupid me still did it... It only now posts this on serial console:
Trying Uart
BootROM - 1.73
Booting from SPI flash
BootROM: Bad header at offset D4000000
BootROM: Bad header at offset D4200000
BootROM: Bad header at offset D4400000
BootROM: Bad header at offset D4600000
BootROM: Bad header at offset D4800000
BootROM: Bad header at offset D4A00000
BootROM: Bad header at offset D4C00000
BootROM: Bad header at offset D4E00000

Trying Uart B (this is when I try some random u-boot with kwboot, I don't know if a closer device's u-boot will work(something like wrt1200ac-caiman).



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/20/2024 11:19AM by ahlaklisuvari.

Bodhi's Debian has been running great for me on my GoFlexNET for years now :)
Of course it's slow, but enough for my purpose.
I am using it as a print and scan server with overlayroot (https://github.com/nils-werner/raspi-overlayroot) , so I can safely switch it off when I am done scanning/printing without need for shutdown.

Thank you Bodhi! :)

ElMariachi Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Bodhi's Debian has been running great for me on my
> GoFlexNET for years now :)

Cool!

-bodhi
===========================
Forum Wiki
bodhi's corner (buy bodhi a beer)

> But, I actually bricked that device by doing a
> mistake. I overwritten u-boot because of damn
> chatgpt. I knew it would do some bad thing, but
> stupid me still did it... It only now posts this
> on serial console:
> Trying Uart
> BootROM - 1.73
> Booting from SPI flash
> BootROM: Bad header at offset D4000000
> BootROM: Bad header at offset D4200000
> BootROM: Bad header at offset D4400000
> BootROM: Bad header at offset D4600000
> BootROM: Bad header at offset D4800000
> BootROM: Bad header at offset D4A00000
> BootROM: Bad header at offset D4C00000
> BootROM: Bad header at offset D4E00000
>

Find the mtd0 (or the whole flash) backup of this device, or find stock u-boot at the manufacturer website. And then I can help running kwboot to unnbrick.

-bodhi
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I contacted their support, they didn't give me the u-boot :/

So my impression is you have 2 Asustor-AS-1002T. One is OK now, and the other is bricked? If it's true then it's easy just dump u-boot from the good box.

Let's go back to the original thread https://forum.doozan.com/read.php?3,137725 to start unbricking. This thread is for your question about what to buy.

(Please post the log from the following commands in a new post on the original u-boot thread)

Power up the good box, interrupt serial console countdown, and

bdinfo
md.l f1018000 8
md.l f1018100 1
md.l f1018140 1
help
printenv

and then boot

boot

Let it boot all the way to the Debian login prompt.

And post the entire serial console log here (from the u-boot banner until the login prompt).

-bodhi
===========================
Forum Wiki
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Hi Bodhi, sorry for long time. I luckily had another one of those devices, in a working condition :) I'll try to get a working u-boot from that device. I asked chatgpt4 of how would I do that with that u-boot of AS1002t, so it responded like this:
usb start #assumes I have a USB disk here
mtdparts
nand read 0x80000000 0x0 0x1000000 # Reads 16MB from NAND starting at offset 0
ext4write usb 0:1 /backup_nand.bin 0x80000000 0x1000000 #change stuff accordingly if any

Is this right? So when I have that, what should I do with that .bin file? I could directly flash that into that broken AS1002T, with desoldering and stuff. I have the SPI flasher. But, is it possible to do without desoldering? Can I possibly get u-boot partition from this bin file, or the whole partition is already u-boot maybe? Can I post the bin file here when I get it?