On 21/04/2014 07:06, Ben Mulvihill wrote:
> Hi John,
> 
> May I take up your offer of a hand with overlayfs on top of ubi? I
> have in fact managed to get a working overlay + ubi image, and also
> a ubifs image. But I still have a few questions:
> 
> - Am I right in thinking that there is no way to concatenate the 
> kernel and ubi image and have them split automatically like with 
> the squashfs image without ubi?

i added a ubi-flash tool to trunk that can be used to flash ubi
volumes (and implicitly resize them)

i plan to add a wrapper script this week. this script will be fed a
tar file with the kernel and rootfs image. this allows us to "split"
the files when flashing.

i am using fixed size kernel part sizes for nand, there is enough
space anyhow.



> - Is there any point bothering with a jffs2 image as well, either 
> on top of ubi or not?

i think the best option is flat ubifs or squashfs with jffs2/ubifs as
overlay.

> - the two images require different kernel parameters in the
> 'chosen' line of the device tree: ubi.mtd=rootfs_ubi,256
> root=/dev/mtdblock8 // for overlayfs ubi.mtd=rootfs_ubi,256
> root=ubi0:rootfs    // for ubifs Is there any way of combining them
> so that a single device tree can be used with both images? Passing
> the parameters from uboot ought to be one way of dealing with the
> problem but I believe that with recent kernels parameters passed in
> that way just get clobbered.

i have a patch in my queue that will make the kernel auto-attach the
rootfs_ubi mtd making the volumes inside it mountable. i will do my
best to finsih the patch before the week is over. this will spare us
the cmdline clobbering and not depend on any uboot environemnt variables.


> - What is the best way to get the get the image onto the target? 
> nand write from uboot works fine, but you lose the wear levelling 
> information each time. I have also use tried booting a ramdisk 
> image first, copying root-overlay.ubi to /tmp, and flashing it with
> ubiformat -f. That works too, but is there another option?

on first flash you need to run ubi-format once. my plan is to push a
special initramfs that has the ubi tools inside and carries the target
rootfs as a payload. you flash/boot that image and it will do the rest
of the firstboot/ubi-format for you. this will be part of the wrapper
script mentioned above

> Also, I am a little confused about the status of this patch: 
> http://patchwork.openwrt.org/patch/5110/ You told me it was a
> "really bad idea" so I was expecting it to be rejected! But it is
> appears in patchwork as accepted. Is that a mistake?

the "split ubi volume" patch was a bad idea not this one :) sorry if i
was not clear on that one



hope that clears up some of the questions.

John
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