This page contains information about work to add support to partition MTD flash in Debian installer.
Contents
Outline for future work
- List MTD
- Make Parted understand (thus report) MTD properly?
- Recognize device (do we know partition scheme, proceed only if so)
Read partition table (?RedBoot, UBI, custom)?
- Otherwise?
- Stop if device is not recognized, since continuing would probably be fatal.
- Attach MTD to UBI
- Use mtd-utils for this.
- Prepare
- Create device files indicating it should be formatted and attached to UBI upon commit.
- Commit
- Format selected MTD.
- Attach selected MTD to UBI.
- Create loop label with one big partition (don't write label to MTD).
- Maybe create a "null" label in Parted.
- Set partition flag ubi (for show in d-i).
- Create UBI volumes
- Use mtd-utils for this.
- Create user interface (mashup between LVM/MD).
- Select on which device the volume should be created (as in MD) and name and size (as in LVM)
- List UBI volumes
- Make parted understand UBI (add ability to read UBI volume tables), alternatively,
- create similar scheme as LVM (loop through LVs and add to a loop label). (The former seems preferable.)
- Use UBI volume
- Select as mountpoint basically.
Try existing work
GNU Parted
This is possible to do on an ordinary desktop machine, with nandsim no real MTD is needed.
Download and build the work done on GNU Parted.
Create a 256 MB simulated NAND with the nandsim linux kernel module.
modprobe nandsim first_id_byte=0x20 second_id_byte=0xaa \
third_id_byte=0x00 fourth_id_byte=0x15Also load the mtdchar linux kernel module
modprobe mtdchar
Run parted (with superuser privileges) on the created character device
sudo parted GNU Parted 1.9.0.89-751b-dirty Using /dev/sda Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands. (parted)
Select the device (/dev/mtd0 in this example)
(parted) select /dev/mtd0 Using /dev/mtd0
Create a loop label on the device (WARNING! DO NOT DO THIS ON REAL FLASH, IT WRITES TO THE MEMORY WHICH IS PROBABLY REALLY DANGEROUS!!!)
(parted) mklabel loop (parted) print Model: nand NAND simulator partition 0 (mtd) Disk /dev/mtd0: 256MB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: loop Number Start End Size File system Flags
Monolithic hackish ISO
ISO
Download monolithic Debian installer image from http://sigsucc.se/mtd/mini.iso .
Screenshots
Screenshots of current work and necessary Debian installer patches are available at http://sigsucc.se/mtd/ .
Build it yourself
GNU Parted
Install automake from sid.
(If it does not work then download, build, and install automake 1.11, and symlink $PREFIX/share/aclocal-1.11/pkg.m4 to /usr/share/aclocal/pkg.m4.)
wget ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/automake/automake-1.11.tar.gz tar zxf automake-1.11 cd automake-1.11 ./configure make sudo make install
Clone the Parted git repository and update the git submodules
git clone git://git.debian.org/users/avtobiff-guest/parted.git git submodule init git submodule update
Check out the next-mtd branch
git checkout next-mtd
bootstrap, configure, and build
cd parted ./bootstrap ./configure make sudo make install
Try it out!
Monolithic hackish ISO
Get dependencies and source
Checkout Debian installer
In order to build it yourself do a checkout of Debian installer.
svn co svn://svn.debian.org/svn/d-i/trunk debian-installer
Custom kernel
Compile a kernel with UBI and UBIFS support.
CONFIG_MTD_UBI=m CONFIG_UBIFS_FS=m CONFIG_UBIFS_FS_LZO=y CONFIG_UBIFS_FS_ZLIB=n # Could not zlib compression symbols for some reason.
Also add nandsim kernel module for testing with simulated NAND.
CONFIG_NAND_NANDSIM=m
Build the kernel as documented in DebianInstaller/Modify/CustomKernel
In the source package linux-kernel-di-2.6 (read how to modify Debian installer with custom kernel) add the following files in order to include mtd, ubi and nandsim.
cd linux-kernel-di-2.6* echo <<EOF >>package-list Package: lzo-modules Depends: kernel-image, core-modules Package: mtd-modules Depends: kernel-image, core-modules Package: nand-modules Depends: kernel-image, core-modules, mtd-modules Package: nandsim-modules Depends: kernel-image, core-modules, nand-modules Package: ubi-modules Depends: kernel-image, core-modules, nand-modules, crc-modules Package: ubifs-modules Depends: kernel-image, core-modules, mtd-modules, ubi-modules, lzo-modules, zlib-modules, crc-modules EOF echo lzo >modules/i386/lzo-modules (echo mtd echo mtdblock echo mtdchar ) >modules/i386/mtd-modules echo nand >modules/i386/nand-modules echo nandsim >modules/i386/nandsim-modules echo ubi >modules/i386/ubi-modules echo ubifs >modules/i386/ubifs-modules
Now build the kernel udebs (build the package).
Partman UBI
Main module partman-ubi is available in git.
Clone and build:
git clone git://git.debian.org/avtobiff-guest/partman-ubi.git cd partman-ubi git-buildpackage
liblzo2 udeb
Creating udeb of liblzo2 (build dependency for MTD utils).
Clone and build:
git clone git://git.debian.org/avtobiff-guest/lzo2.git cd lzo2 git-buildpackage
MTD utils
MTD utils, udeb is needed to manage UBI.
Clone and build:
git clone git://git.debian.org/avtobiff-guest/mtd-utils.git cd mtd-utils git-buildpackage
nandsim udeb
For convenience I have added a simple script which loads the nandsim module and creates a 256 MB NAND flash.
Clone and build
git clone git://git.debian.org/avtobiff-guest/nandsim-auto.git cd nandsim-auto git-buildpackage
Finish
Copy all resulting udebs from the steps above to debian-installer/installer/build/localudebs/.
Building
Patch with patches to Debian installer to enable building with a custom kernel, make partman handle MTD and UBI, and pinning the custom udebs for inclusion in the d-i build process.
Patch with Debian installer patch blob
cd debian-installer wget http://sigsucc.se/mtd/patches/d-i-blob.patch patch < d-i-blob.patch
Build partman-base and copy to localudebs for inclusion
cd packages/partman/partman-base dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -us -uc cp ../*udeb ../../installer/build/localudebs
Make sure that installer/build/preferences.udeb.local pins the udebs to the version supplied in installer/build/localudebs. Also make sure that every package listed in installer/build/pkg-lists/local is supplied in installer/build/localudebs.
Build monolithic image
fakeroot make rebuild_monolithic
Finally run the resulting monolithic image (in KVM for instance)
kvm -cdrom debian-installer/installer/build/dest/monolithic/mini.iso \
-boot d -redir tcp:8080::80 -no-reboot