I was recently able to compile a 4.2 kernel on 686 GNewsense and then use it to mount a 10 TB encrypted USB drive with a newer ext4 file system. This makes it a little easier to share files between my computers at home and may make other devices available to my GNewsense installs.
The notes I made for myself were: I'd like to have ext4 partitions made on Stretch work on my TV computer, which has a 32bit GNewsense install. New Ext4_Metadata_Checksums features made this difficult. I followed my notes for mounting encrypted volumes here, http://50.80.75.248/photo_album/chron/2018/2018_12_26-mounting_encrypted_drives/ but ran into a checksum difference. GNewsense has a 3.2 kernel which does not seem to be able to read some ext4 attributes, so the device does not mount rw. I got, "EXT4-fs (dm-3): couldn't mount RDWR because of unsupported optional features (400)" This seems to be due to a new metadata checksum, https://ext4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Ext4_Metadata_Checksums The recommended cure is to install a new kernel, 3.6 and above and a newer version of e2fsprogs. Unfortunately, I don't have an 686 kernel package sitting around, so I'll use the TV install to compile one using the instructions from Jessie - see pdf capture. I just happen to have 4.2 linux libre kernel source, one of the last kernels that does not trigger the Coreboot century bug in the versions of Libreboot I have. I got Gnewsense fakeroot and kernel-package ... and that fails. falling back to older instructions, which also call for build-essential and build-dep linux The I used make config, long and tedious but make xconfig and make menuconfig failed me. make clean, worked make deb-pkg failed for lack of bc, apt-get install bc worked, seems to have fixed that problem. ... and success one of the best compiles I've done yet. willhill@gnewsense:~/src/librelinux$ ls -lrth total 39M -rw-r--r-- 1 willhill willhill 62K Jun 29 13:48 debian-ch08s06-compiling_a_new_kernel.pdf drwxr-xr-x 25 willhill willhill 4.0K Jun 29 15:40 linux-4.2.5 -rw-r--r-- 1 willhill willhill 3.7K Jun 29 15:40 linux-firmware-image-4.2.5-gnu1_4.2.5-gnu1-1_i386.deb -rw-r--r-- 1 willhill willhill 9.2M Jun 29 15:40 linux-headers-4.2.5-gnu1_4.2.5-gnu1-1_i386.deb -rw-r--r-- 1 willhill willhill 1.1M Jun 29 15:40 linux-libc-dev_4.2.5-gnu1-1_i386.deb -rw-r--r-- 1 willhill willhill 29M Jun 29 15:40 linux-image-4.2.5-gnu1_4.2.5-gnu1-1_i386.deb all packages installed without issue and archived for future use. The new kernel booted. After starting cryptsys again, I was able to mount the 10TB drive as dm-3 to /mnt. This method does not cleanly unmount devices, so it's only useful for drives you want on till shutdown. Gnome-disks in Debian Stretch does clean mounts and unmounts, so I can sync things on other computers running that software until I understand how it works. I managed to install a newer version of gnome-disks on Debian Wheezy through the Guix package manager, but it was unable to mount or even see drive volumes. This method might also completely blow up your files because, I don't think that I installed newer versions of e2fsprogs. I imagined that I might find and install those through Debian backports, but I did not document it and two months later don't remember if I did or not. I'm not too worried about the files on my TV computer blowing up. Happy hacking. _______________________________________________ gNewSense-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnewsense-users
