Question about Debian Kirkwood 4.12.1 rootfs

Hi, Bodhi:
I haven't touch my Dockstars and Pogo Mobile Debian implementations for some time but they have been working flawlessly for many years. They are still my main work houses for VOIP.
Recently, Google Voice has made significant changes so the old implementations do not work anymore. Fortunately, naf at VOIP Tech Chat Forum figure out a way to support the new protocol "gvsip". Since his code does not work well on older Debian distributions, I had to up date my Dockstar Debian to Stretch.
I found the easiest way to upgrade to flash your 4.12.1 rootfs. I then upgraded Kernel to 4.18.4. Everything works fine. Thank you very much for doing good service for the community. However, I have two questions.
1. I flashed your 4.12.1 rootfs onto a working Wheezy rootfs. It works fine. However, if I format the USB drive and flash the 4.12.1 rootfs onto the clean drive, it does not boot correctly to run. Is this normal?
2. After flash and upgrade, the files related to old kernel's still exist. Can I or should delete these?
Thanks.
(P.S. This should be submitted to the 4.18.4 thread but it is closed.)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/25/2018 12:13AM by bodhi.

twinclouds,

Yes, I've closed the thread because I don't want to have to spend time to split the posts when people posted questions or problem that are not really about the kernel or rootfs :) Those types of posts should be new Debian threads. The kernel release threads became too big, it is very hard to find something in there anyway.

> 1. I flashed your 4.12.1 rootfs onto a working
> Wheezy rootfs.

This is not the right way. The Debian-4.12.1-kirkwood-tld-1-rootfs-bodhi.tar.bz2 rootfs should be extracted onto an empty drive.

> 2. After flash and upgrade, the files related to
> old kernel's still exist. Can I or should delete
> these?

After you've updated the kernel a few times, you should purge old ones using dpkg, to free up space. Other than space related reason, there is no need to remove the old kernels. And you should keep at least one old version that has been working.

-bodhi
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Thank you for your reply.
You said: "This is not the right way. The Debian-4.12.1-kirkwood-tld-1-rootfs-bodhi.tar.bz2 rootfs should be extracted onto an empty drive. "
That was I thought and I did that. However, I cannot communicate with the Dockstar with the new rootfs through SSH. Nothing was shown on the local network. Do I need to do anything besides flashing drive and plug it into the Dockstar?

twinclouds,

> Do I need to do anything besides
> flashing drive and plug it into the Dockstar?

You should make sure that your u-boot envs can boot this rootfs, that's it. IOW, depending how the current u-boot installation was set up (if it is too old then it will not boot). Which version of u- boot and what are the u-boot envs look like? do you have a bootlog of the Dockstar with the rootfs you used before this attempt?

-bodhi
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I just flashed you 2017 uboot version yesterday. The fw_printenv output is attached. Can you see anything wrong?

This is wrong

dtb_file=/boot/dts/kirkwood-pogo_e02.dtb

should be

dtb_file=/boot/dts/kirkwood-dockstar.dtb

And also please describe what is the behavior of the LED during boot. Since you don't have serial console, and did not set up netconsole, it is hard to tell what happened when u-boot started and tried to load the kernel files.

-bodhi
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I changed the .dtb file env items. The LED now looks normal. It started with flash green, then become steady yellow and then become steady green. Looks like it boots fine but there's no Ethernet connection.
I have never used netconsole. I will probably need to dug out the serial cable. I have bought a couple of FT232RL FTDI Basic USB to serial interface boards for connecting with Arduino. Do you think these will work as the serial cable?

twinclouds,

> I changed the .dtb file env items. The LED now
> looks normal. It started with flash green, then
> become steady yellow and then become steady green.
> Looks like it boots fine but there's no Ethernet
> connection.

Yes. The kernel has booted. But your rootfs has mounting problem.

> I have never used netconsole. I will probably
> need to dug out the serial cable. I have bought a
> couple of FT232RL FTDI Basic USB to serial
> interface boards for connecting with Arduino. Do
> you think these will work as the serial cable?

I'm not sure. I don't have those converters.

I think you probably don't need to connect serial console yet. You have a working rootfs as you mentioned "a working Wheezy rootfs". Boot with that and examine the new rootfs to see if we can tell why it was not mounted. Or you could mount the new rootfs on another Linux box and do that.

-bodhi
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Hi, Bodhi:
I connected the serial cable and got a lot of errors with the 4.12 rootfs. I have attached the print out of the boot process with errors. If you you have time, please take a look.
I have tried different USB drives so it should not be drives' problem
The situation is, if I use a usb drive contains Wheezy installation and put the 4.12 rootfs on top of it, everything works fine. A file of the good booting process is also attached. It just does not work if I put the rootfs into a freshly formatted drive.
Since the first case works, it is not urgent. Of course, any of you comments and suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

twinclouds,

I need to see the full bootlog for the error case. Your DockstarError.txt log is not a ful bootlog.

-bodhi
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Bodhi:
The first part does not have errors so it is the same as the good one. I can generate another full one for you soon.
Thanks for your help.

O.K. Here is the complete log.

It appears that you forgot to label the root partition on the Patriot Memory stick as "rootfs" so it tries to use the internal NAND for the root filesystem. Take you Patriot Memory stick another system and use the e2label command to label the root partition as "rootfs".

Ray

twinclouds,

Quote
Ray
It appears that you forgot to label the root partition on the Patriot Memory stick as "rootfs" so it tries to use the internal NAND for the root filesystem. Take you Patriot Memory stick another system and use the e2label command to label the root partition as "rootfs".

That could be a remote possibilty. But perhaps not. The good boot and the error boot logs both showed

[    0.000000] Kernel command line: console=ttyS0,115200 root=LABEL=rootfs rootdelay=10 mtdparts=orion_nand:1M(u-boot),4M(uImage),32M(rootfs),-(data)

So it is unlikely that the USB rootfs was not labeled.

It it was labeled correctly, the most likely problem here is a bad USB drive. I've noticed you use a Patriot drive for the test. That's not recommended (Patriot brand is notoriously bad for a rootfs drive). You should use the Sandisk Cruzer drive like you do for the "good" rootfs. If you don't have one handy, you should backup the Sandisk drive and use reuse that. It would remove a lot of uncertainty.

-bodhi
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twinclouds,

Also remember to be root user while you extract the rootfs onto the newly formatted drive.

-bodhi
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That's all I did. Still does not look good. I will try to use a better drive to see what happens and let you know.
Thank you very much for your help.
Good night!

Hi, Bodhi:
With your help, eventually I made it work. Basically, I formatted USB drive to have ext4 file system with label rootfs. A better drive certainly also helped. I generated a tarball of Debian 9.5 with your kernel 4.18.4. If you are interested I can upload it.
Thanks again for your help

twinclouds Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Hi, Bodhi:
> With your help, eventually I made it work.
> Basically, I formatted USB drive to have ext4 file
> system with label rootfs. A better drive
> certainly also helped.

Cool!

> I generated a tarball of
> Debian 9.5 with your kernel 4.18.4. If you are
> interested I can upload it.
> Thanks again for your help

Thanks twinclouds, but that won't be necessary.

-bodhi
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