Comments on: A better pivotroot for OpenWRT

By: quddus

quddus — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 23:17:20 +0000

I have seen and checked your script and is waiting for your swap option in the script to test if it works.

I have been trying to use my own but failed each time.

By: ScApi

ScApi — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 14:52:06 +0000

As I and You expected it didn’t worked , this had something to do with firstboot script, but I didn’t digg deeper.

Something about the web management pakages.

X-Wrt is working except installation of packages via WebGui.

Gargoyle is working except graphs (their missing, code is pointing to empty tmp dir)

OpenWrt web – not yet tested, will try tommorow,

And something that I’v added to the script, include swap utils, and makeswap + swapon, it really speeds up my device.

By: kaufman

kaufman — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 12:31:16 +0000

@ScApi, you can build the USB image however you want, you just need to be prepared for it not to work . Since you can just pull the USB stick and power-cycle, it seems like the experiment is pretty low-risk. Let us know how it works out.

The space requirements (on flash) for ext3 are nearly the same as for ext2, but ext2 is a completely valid choice. The upside of ext3 is the journaling, which gives better recovery from an unclean shutdown. The downside is that the frequent journal-writing will kill your USB stick faster. I choose safety, and anticipate replacing USB sticks.

By: ScApi

ScApi — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 08:30:48 +0000

I’ve switched to ext2, formatted usb stick to ext2, and finaly boot works, I think it has be something in image creation, sine 520GC has only 2mb flash, I removed almost everything from flash to add required modules, I’l try to change to ext3 in future but now another question, can i simply copy contents of image builder temp dir to usb stick (dir with I think all flash files) ? or it has to be copied from working flash ?

By: kaufman

kaufman — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 00:33:05 +0000

@ScApi, if the pivotroot script works after you booted then the usual reason is you’re preloading the wrong kernel modules (foreach loop with insmod in it). The right kernel modules get loaded when the boot completes, and then when you try pivotroot again it magically works.

Another possibility is that your flash drive is an ext2 not an ext3 (since e2fsck works it out for itself, but the mount line is hardcoded to ext3).

Another possibility is that the /flash directory is missing. But these latter two possibilities don’t explain why the pivotroot would work after booting. For that, kernel modules are the most likely explanation.

By: ScApi

ScApi — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:50:18 +0000

I forgot to mention something, pivotroot script is working fine after booting openwrt normally and then plunging usb stick and firing the script

By: ScApi

ScApi — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:27:54 +0000

I have a problem, openwrt simply isn’t booting from flash, I think that something is wrong with usb flash drive but simply don’t know what.

My pivotroot.log
pivotroot loading kernel modules: usbcore usb-ohci scsi_mod sd_mod usb-storage e
pivotroot checking /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1
/dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1: clean, 414/115200 files, 17189/459852 b
fsck status is 0
Mounting /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1
mount status is 255

By: kaufman

kaufman — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 19:14:48 +0000

@nathane, that's an interesting question, because I prefer that /etc on flash not be in sync with /etc on the USB drive. I wrote a blog post explaining why.

By: nathane

nathane — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 04:07:42 +0000

Awesome stuff. Though I was hoping you might have a solution to the problem of keeping /etc/config/system and /[flash|mnt]/config/system in sync. For example, if I change the hostname using LUCI that is saved in /etc/config/system. But upon reboot, the internal system file is used and it stays with the old hostname.

There is one howto (http://oldwiki.openwrt.org/OpenWrtDocs(2f)KamikazeConfiguration(2f)BootFromExternalMediaHowTo.html) which mentions doing a “bind mount” of /etc to avoid this . Their method is totally different from yours and the traditional OpenWRT method it is based on.

How to you avoid this problem?

Thanks

By: happybit

happybit — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 01:53:35 +0000

kaufman, it’s actually done on the flash filesystem, not on the usb filesystem, but openvpn and miniupnpd can’t start up either. I don’t why????

In my system, there is no /etc/init.d/syslog file, just /etc/init.d/boot file.