Mele SATA boot - can it be done?

I doubt it. . .

According to the available documentation you must boot from either SD, NAND, or USB.
But what about SATA boot?

Edit:
But only if you hack uboot to do it!

Jeff?
davygravy?
are either of you up to it?



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 06/29/2012 03:49PM by gnexus.

Any news here ?

I currently have a SATA SSD in my Mele A2000 and I would love to boot Linux from it, especially because I need the SD slot.
I'm planning to take my A2000 with me on my holidays and use it as an automatic SD card backup machine (without display or any input device)
So when a SD card is inserted, start an rsync job which pushes all new camera images on the SD card to the SATA SSD.

I just tried this on Android as I can use the SD slot here. The rsync script works, but I can't install tasker to run the script when the SDcard is mounted.

I'm sure this can be easily solved, but I want to do it on Debian :-)
So is there any way to boot from SATA or USB and keep the SD slot free ?

Thanks

edit: btw: gnexus, thanks for your amazing work !!!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/22/2012 08:37AM by d1dd1.

I'm currently working on getting SATA and USB booting capability into u-boot like is supported on Kirkwood and other platforms. That is what is required to be able to boot those devices. But it is going to be quite a while yet. Unfortunately there are not any low-level A10 SATA, USB or NET drivers in u-boot right now. Allwinner did not implement that in their u-boot, and it seems it has not been a priority for the uboot-allwinner maintainers. So we are going to have to do it ourselves :(

But I do have a solution for your problem. Just use an extra USB mmc card reader. That is what I'm doing.

You should be able to put the uImage/uInitrd files on your SD card, let uBoot read them and then tell the kernel to load the rootfs from sda1. You'll have to boot with the SD card, but after the system is up you should be able to remove the SD card.

Thanks for your help !

I would prefer Jeff's solution. Could you give me a hint where to configure this ?

Quote

I would prefer Jeff's solution.

So would I, at least for now until we can also get the kernel loaded from SATA too. I would much rather be booting from SATA. SD cards are all very slow and should be avoided for the rootfs if possible. Even the class 10 ones are slower than SATA.

But, (this is a rather big butt. . . and the reason I didn't think of Jeff's idea) in order to use Jeff's idea you need an initramfs to load the SATA driver modules. The SATA driver is not built into the kernel. So the only way to get Jeff's idea to work is to build an initramfs. Debian has a tool to do this, update-initramfs. I have not attempted to use an initramfs, but it should be simple enough to do.

The other option is to build the SATA driver into the kernel. That is not something I am willing to do. I'm trying to get modules out of the kernel as per Debian specifications, not put them in. But you can always build your own kernel using the kernel config here as an initial template and then use the kernel menuconfig to choose the SATA module as built-in.

Either way you will also need to specify the correct root device in u-boot and save the environment. You will also need to be using the 3.0.36+ kernel, as the older kernel has the root device location built into the kernel itself.

If all this is a bit much for you then just give us some time and use my idea of a USB mmc card reader for now. I also want to be able to boot from SATA. Making an initramfs is next on my todo list after updating the OS images here with the new kernel and u-boot.

Ok, looks like I have to wait or choose the cardreader solution. :-)

Thanks !

Hello. Topic in this forum was created in July. Is there any results for placing rootfs on your hard drive? If you have positive results, please tell us about them. Particularly interested in the boot loader configuration (bootargs etc.).

Quote

Hello. Topic in this forum was created in July. Is there any results for placing rootfs on your hard drive?

This thread is very old and out of date. . .

It is now easily possible to boot from: NAND, SATA, USB, and NFS. . . . and of course MMC, and you do not even need to use an MMC card to do it if you install the NAND u-boot to the Android boot partition.

Please see http://a10linux.org for details and multi-boot u-boot, kernel and SD images.

Hi gnexus,

As you may know, http://a10linux.org is no longer alive. May you point me to other source for bootin/moving the rootfs to SATA on Mele A2000G ?

Thanks !!!
Alberto

gnexus Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>

Quote

Hello. Topic in this forum was created in
> July. Is there any results for placing rootfs on
> your hard drive?

>
> This thread is very old and out of date. .
> .
>
> It is now easily possible to boot from: NAND,
> SATA, USB, and NFS. . . . and of course MMC,
> and you do not even need to use an MMC card to do
> it if you install the NAND u-boot to the Android
> boot partition.
>
> Please see http://a10linux.org for details and
> multi-boot u-boot, kernel and SD images.