I just wanted to report, while the details are still fresh in my mind, that this afternoon I upgraded my Plug using the alpha-6 installer. It was ultimately successful, and I am delighted with the results, but it took me a couple attempts to succeed, and I'd like to record the pitfalls in the hope that they might be of benefit to someone else. BTW, thus far, I am similarly delighted to see that this version of the OS seems much fuller-featured. It does seem to support loopback devices, and it does recognize my USB-to-serial cable -- something I intend to start testing with soon.
On the first attempt, the new Uboot and Uboot-environment installed fine from openocd (whew!), but the procedure errored-out while trying to invoke the installer software on the thumb drive. After the failure, I got into the new Uboot and tried to manually investigate what was going on. What I found was that the
usb start command was failing -- 1 USB Device(s) found... 0 Storage Device(s) found. After resetting the Plug, the command would succeed once -- 2 USB Device(s) found... 1 Storage Device(s) found -- and then fail on subsequent invocations until the Plug was again reset.
So, I reset the Plug, broke out of the Uboot boot sequence to the "Marvell>>" prompt, and then ran the installer again. This time it worked beautifully.
I do have a couple questions:
+ What is the 2nd USB device that the
usb start command finds (and I suppose this is the one that it finds all the time, even on its subsequent invocations)?
+ I changed the
ethaddr in the uboot-custom.txt of the installer to my MAC address before running the install. However, I elected not to change
orion_nand to
orion_mtd. The way I read the comments, this change should have been made. I did not do this because I figured if it needed to be changed, it would have been. Is this comment wrong?
+ I did not change the
bootargs_root even though I want to eventually utilize an SDcard for the root file system (and even boot off of this device at some point, now that I have the new Uboot that supports this). I wasn't really sure what to change this argument to, so I elected to leave it alone. Perhaps it would be better if there were commented-out
bootargs_root examples for the SD card and USB stick options, so that we could simply uncomment the one we desired.
+ Now that I'm up and running on the new OS, how
do I convert to using the SDcard? Can I simply follow the wiki (
http://www.openplug.org/plugwiki/index.php/SD_Card_As_Root_File_System ) and copy the filesystem to the SDcard and then essentially change
bootargs_root to "root=/dev/mmcblk0p1", like I did the last time? (Do I still need to set up the ubifs if I do this, and if so, how do I do this -- perhaps "bootargs_root=ubi.mtd=1 root=/dev/mmcblk0p1"? What happens if I want to access the mtd partitions while running from the SDcard? I suppose I need an active ubifs to do so.)
+ Now that I have a Uboot that can boot from the SDcard, if I want to upgrade to the latest 2.6.30 kernel, can I do so by simply copying it onto the SDcard root partition and boot from there, thus bypassing the mtd/NAND entirely (and can someone provide the bootargs to do this)?
That's enough for now. Again, my thanks to Rabeeh for all his hard work in producing this excellent installer, and thanks in advance to anyone who can give me some advice on the questions I've asked here.
