GTI Mirabox, Netgear RN102/RN104, Netgear RN2120 Installation & Kernel Upgrade (Linux-6.7.5)

Hi Trond,

> most likely because 'mkimage' on the 2nd box do
> not support 'MODULES=dep':

> So it seems 'mkimage' got a face lift in Debian
> Bookworm?

Probably not that reason. Because 'MODULES=dep" was in Debian 11.x

This is one of my home media NAS boxes, still running Debian 11.

root@HomeMedia1:~# cat /etc/debian_version 
11.1

root@HomeMedia1:~# grep -i modules /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf 
# MODULES: [ most | netboot | dep | list ]
# dep - Try and guess which modules to load.
# netboot - Add the base modules, network modules, but skip block devices.
# list - Only include modules from the 'additional modules' list
MODULES=most

Perhpas "dep" did not work before. I'll try a test to see if can recreate your observation.

-bodhi
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Hi Trond,

> Perhpas "dep" did not work before. I'll try a test
> to see if can recreate your observation.

I've verified that "MODULES=dep" works in Debian 11.

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Here is kernel linux-6.7.5-mvebu-370xp-tld-3. The objective is to:

- Configured as SMP kernel, to add support for Netgear RN2120 (Armada XP 2-cores)
- I2S and SPDIF still configured in the kernel (these were removed in linux-6.7.5-mvebu-370xp-tld-2).
- The DTB for Netgear RN120 has Audio Controller nodes removed. This is for testing the time lag issue in RN102 (see if it will help or hurt).

Download at Dropbox

linux-6.7.5-mvebu-370xp-tld-3-bodhi.tar.bz2

md5:
a44771dd7d586d2171d9c68aeb19e96e
sha256:
d9e82ba31cf2ddc123aa882bee0dd4c4c05ab5095eccc7546c6c8d33fb9f100c

This tarball contains 5 files

linux-image-6.7.5-mvebu-370xp-tld-3_3_armhf.deb
linux-headers-6.7.5-mvebu-370xp-tld-3_3_armhf.deb
zImage-6.7.5-mvebu-370xp-tld-3
config-6.7.5-mvebu-370xp-tld-3
linux-dtb-6.7.5-mvebu-370xp-tld-3.tar

Please do a full kernel installation (see instruction for kernel linux-6.5.7-mvebu-370xp-tld-1 up top).

-bodhi
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Hi bodhi,

Thank you very much for your efforts! I have successfully installed Linux kernel version 'linux-6.7.5-mvebu-370xp-tld-3' on a Readynas RN102. It works a expected.

To check the system clock, I disabled the 'crontab' job that updates the system clock from the hardware clock once a minute. I also made the RN102 trust my laptop so that 'ssh' works without a password. On the laptop I inquired the system clock twice, with a 5 minutes delay in between:

$ uname -a
Linux rn102 6.7.5-mvebu-370xp-tld-3 #1 SMP PREEMPT Thu Feb 29 19:03:59 PST 2024 armv7l GNU/Linux

$ cat /etc/debian_version 
12.4

$ ssh rn102 date -R && sleep 300 && ssh rn102 date -R
Sun, 03 Mar 2024 22:41:39 +0100
Sun, 03 Mar 2024 22:46:14 +0100

So the rn102's system clock lagged 25 seconds in 5 minutes. That's 5 seconds per minute.

Regards,
Trond Melen

Hi Trond,

6.7.5-mvebu-370xp-tld-3

> So the rn102's system clock lagged 25 seconds in 5
> minutes. That's 5 seconds per minute.

6.7.5-mvebu-370xp-tld-2

> It used to be lagging 6 to 7 seconds
> per minute. Now it's lagging just above 5 seconds
> per minute.

So it proved that the kernel configs for I2S and SPIF can remain, we just need to remove the audio controller nodes in the DTS to see the difference.

And also perhaps later you can tell if SMP kernel performance is about the same as non-SMP in some tasks. Or if the difference is insignificant. The reason I used non-SMP was from danitool's testing on OpenWrt as credited in the 1st post (there are some other tweaks for Armada 370 SoC by danitool that I have not looked into)

But SMP on a single CPU should only incur some very small overhead, IMO.

-bodhi
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Kernel linux-6.7.5-mvebu-370xp-tld-3 package has been uploaded. See 1st post for download link.

Note that this is the same as the working kernel I've uploaded before in this thread.

-bodhi
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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/13/2024 06:24PM by bodhi.

pczerepaniak & Trond,

I've tried WOL on my Mirabox and it did not work either.

Note that in /etc/init.d/halt the NETDOWN is not clear. So the halt action would shutdown the network.

halt -d -f $netdown $poweroff $hddown

So I explicitly modified this initscript to do

halt -d -f $poweroff $hddown

Even with the above change, WOL does nothing.

Translate all of the above to systemd scripts if you are running it.

-bodhi
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