Hi experts! I recently bought a NAS with the Marvell Armada 385 dual core CPU and 2x 8TB disks. The performance of the hardware is excellent but the software from the manufacturer is ugly with a rather old kernel (3.10).
I succeeded cross-building a recent 4.9.y kernel using kernel config and dts from the manufacturers GPL source with Debian Stretch armhf. All this works perfect. Since I prefer not to repeatedly build a kernel I tried using the Debian multi platform kernel 4.9.0-8-armmp. It does work, but I was not able to solve the following problems: a) In the kernel config I used, the buffer management CONFIG_MVNETA_BM_ENABLE was set, while in config-4.9.0-8-armmp it is not set. This seems to lower network throughput by approx. 20%. Imho all Marvell 38x are capable of using this buffer management and therefore it seems preferable to switch it on by default? b) Dmesg always shows "sr_init: platform driver register failed for SR". This comes from activated SmartReflex/OMAP power management which lacks in all Marvell designs. It seems not to have other consequences but I would prefer not to see any errors in dmesg. Many thanks for your help. LinAdmin
