A new uboot patch to support >2TB HDD?

A few months ago I bought a 3TB WD HDD and I returned it to the store after I realized that uBoot didn't support HDD greater that 2TB. It was just impossible to boot my Pogoplug V2 with the HDD attached, although the drive was working fine if attached after boot process. Today, I came across a patch released last month that I believe would fix this problem:

http://www.mail-archive.com/u-boot@lists.denx.de/msg110553.html

As I'm not an expert, I would like to seek advice from others before attempting anything. Maybe someone more knowledgeable could compile a more recent version of uBoot that would allow HDD with more that 2TB?

Thanks!

Will see if I can build 2013.04 uBoot, which should have this patch. Still, I'm not sure if netconsole will work properly with this later uBoot version.

I've built the 2013.04 uBoot and tried it on a GoFlex Net. It still has problem with netconsole, so I consider it not fit for public consumption. There seems to be a race condition in netconsole input logic (it exhibits different behavior when debug is turned on and not turned on). It booted in normal mode OK, and also OK in serial console, but can't boot in netconsole.

Netconsole is too valuable to loose, so I don't think it is acceptable to use this uBoot version. And also I should note that it could have been just my uBoot build that has problem, I've posted in the news group, but nobody seems to care to try it to verify the problem. It could be that they don't have this problem due to their box specific timing that enable it to run OK.

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

Thanks for your considerable effort in trying to solve this issue. I hope someone in the news group will have a look on your uBoot build and shed some light on this behavior. On a side note, I always had problems with netconsole. It always worked pretty randomly for me on the current build but I understand it is unacceptable if it doesn't work at all with the one you compiled.

Not so good news!

It does not seem latest uBoot version 2013.04 has support for GPT disk > 2TB yet. It does suports GPT partition, but because of this bug, GPT partition size can only be < 2TB.

u-boot-2013.04/disk/part_efi.c

/*
 * Problems with CONFIG_SYS_64BIT_LBA:
 *
 * struct disk_partition.start in include/part.h is sized as ulong.
 * When CONFIG_SYS_64BIT_LBA is activated, lbaint_t changes from ulong to uint64_t.
 * For now, it is cast back to ulong at assignment.
 *
 * This limits the maximum size of addressable storage to < 2 Terra Bytes
 */

Looking closely at the patch, it only adds support for ISO partition.

What about this one?

http://www.mail-archive.com/u-boot@lists.denx.de/msg115077.html

@pancho22,

I dont think it will work because the reason stated above in part_efi.c. Last time I've looked, the code is still the same.

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

hello, i don't have yet a hdd>2tb, but i'm going to by one.
Somthing is not clear in my mind :
uBoot does not support HDD > 2tb or uBoot does not support booting on partition > 2tb ?
In other words, is it possible to boot with uBoot from a HDD>2tb within a boot partition <=2tb ?

uBoot just hangs if a HDD >2TB is attached during boot process. So yeah, not only it doesn't support booting from from a HDD >2TB, it is completely impossible to use one unless it is connected after the OS is started. It isn't an option for me because some daemons I use that are started during OS booting need the HDD to be mounted... I hope someone would find a solution for that.

@pancho22,

Good news! the new uBoot build I just created does work with >2TB HDD. This is when the HDD is attached as a second drive formatted as EXT3.
http://forum.doozan.com/read.php?3,12381,12890#msg-12890

Running without netconsole works fine. With netconsole, a work around is needed as described in that post.

I'll upload it for testing sometime today.

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



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/05/2013 01:16PM by bodhi.