On 28/05/12 20:38, Luka Perkov wrote:
> I got feedback from Kaloz regarding ubifs - we should boot from
> squashfs, and create ubifs after that.
I'm using a single UBI mtd partition and having two volumes:
One "static" (r/o in UBI terminology) for rom (i.e. what used to be the content
of squashfs, but including the kernel-uImage) and one "dynamic" (overlay, what
used to be JFFS2) for the user to change. Apparently UBI is by far not as
efficient as squashfs... However, it got the advantage that U-Boot can read from
it and we won't need an extra volume (or even worse: mtd partition) for the
kernel-uImage, but it can be just a regular file, which is most transparent for
the user.
Besides space-efficiency (which is not so much an issue on most platforms using
NAND anyway), what speaks against a static UBIFS for the factory FS?

Alternatively, the uImage could be a seperate UBI volume and we could use
squashfs using gluebi (or make squashfs work on UBI volumes instead of MTD
partitions).

In the end of the day, what matters most is just having everything inside UBI
volumes and having U-Boot as well as U-Boot environment redundant. In that way,
no single NAND bad-block can ever brick the device (but you can still loose
data, obviously or have your factory/rootfs destroyed). How and what we use
*inside* UBI (uImage-volume+squashfs-volume+ubifs-overlay-volume vs.
ubifs-rom-volume-including-uImage+ubifs-overlay-volume) is a matter of taste.
Both ways have advantages and disadvantages:
Increased efficiency comes together with increased complexity -- personally I'd
be more happy to waste a couple of megs of nand (usually we got plenty) for
having a simple solution using just one type of filesystem and storage 
subsystem.

>> I recently also updated Das U-Boot to the most recent stable version which 
>> now
>> got very well working support for UBIFS, in that way, the bootloader can
>> (similarly to GRUB on x86) read the kernel-uImage from the filesystem which
>> makes things much more transparent for the user. 
> This is true. I'm using this setup on my kirkwood unit. I use upstream
> uboot.
Having it built automatically using the OpenWrt toolchain would be nice.
See
https://lists.openwrt.org/pipermail/openwrt-devel/2012-May/015291.html
https://lists.openwrt.org/pipermail/openwrt-devel/2012-May/015292.html
https://lists.openwrt.org/pipermail/openwrt-devel/2012-May/015293.html

Is there any reason why this cannot be included/updated?

>> As I got no reaction on that at all, I seems like the kirkwood target is
>> abandoned, which is a petty for that very developer-friendly platform which 
>> is
>> the first embedded platform for many new-commers in the field.
>> What's the situation?
> I'm planning to resend the patches. Also, I would like to rework scripts
> so we have something like: target/linux/lantiq/base-files/lib/
Great to see things are moving forward. I got the resources to be working on
that matter most of the time in the next two days. I'll be happy to cross-review
and discuss things with you. (I'll be on #openwrt-devel most of the day tomorrow
and Tuesday as well, I'm in GMT+2, but I don't get up too early :)


Cheers


Daniel
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