[ts-7000] Simplifying Booting TS-7260 to Debian Sarge in SD card

["lucho_ortega" <>]

I have tried to boot to an SD Card for a while and was not totally satisfied with the results. At first I was booting to TS-Linux and that chroot'ing to an USB drive. Of course having a TS-7260 with an SD Card option my goal was to boot from this device. Just for the record, I bought a 4 GB SD card. At first I had issues trying to copy the file system to it by dd'ing one of the TS-7300 images available. I do not know if this is really a solution but I ran mke2fs with the -c option. This process took several hours to complete but after that I was able to create the file system. Of course I had to use fdisk to adjust the partition size and also had to extend the partition as explained somewhere in the wiki.

One I had the file system with the Sarge distribution I followed the instruction from the wiki on booting to an SD card on a TS-7260. Unfortunately I could not get it to boot without having to do a force fsck in every reboot. I would get different time span forcing the reboot, depending on which kernel image I would use to boot. I am not sure why this happened but it did.

I decided to understand what the intermediate file system in initrd did and the whole secret resides in the linuxrc script. It is a very simple script that pivot_root's to the Debian file system that is located in partition 3.

I thought about the process recommended to boot to this image in partition 3 and came to the conclusion that, first I do not need to change the kernel the TS-7260 comes with. Second, I do not need to load to flash that intermediate file system containing the linuxrc script.

What I did was a minor change to the redboot script and placed the the linuxrc script in the on-board file system.

the script for redboot is as follows:

fis load vmlinux
exec -c "console=ttyAM0,115200 root=/dev/mtdblock1 init=/root/linuxrc rw"

As you can see the change is at the end of the regular exec line, where I added the init and rw parameters. I placed the linuxrc script in /root.

#!/bin/sh

# I added real time clock time transfer to system
hwclock -s

cd /
mount -t proc proc /proc
insmod -f sdcard.o -o sdcard0 dmaenable=1 #>/dev/null 2>&1
mount /dev/sdcard0/disc0/part3 /mnt #>/dev/null 2>&1
cd /mnt
pivot_root . tmp
/bin/umount tmp/proc
/bin/mount -n --move tmp/dev /dev
/bin/mount -t proc proc /proc
exec /usr/sbin/chroot . /bin/sh <<- EOF
  /bin/umount tmp
  exec /sbin/init
EOF

I did a minor addition as you may see above and that was to add the setting of the system clock from the real time clock I have on my board. Before adding this line I was getting the following as the file system was mounted ( I am not sure about the reason):

/dev/sdcard0/disc0/part3 has gone 13590 days without being checked, check forced.

I do not get that anymore.

I still have the original kernel and the original file system. Should I find the need to boot to it I would interrupt redboot and change the exec command not to use the init=/root/linuxrc parameter. Things could not get any simpler.

For whatever it is worth there you have it. I hope it is useful to someone else. Thinking about it I could have placed the file system on partition 1 but with a 4 GB SD card it is not worth the effort.

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