[SOLVED] slackware arm 14.1 and ubifs

louigi600 · 12-27-2013, 05:35 AM

This morning I had a go at using ubifs on my dockstar. The journey was far from smooth.

I followed examples from the official ubifs documentation and faq (where possible), supplemanting with some bits and pieces here and there as the official documentation does not guide you trough the whole process step by step (very usefull if you're doing it for the first time).

I've the tree I want to create the image from in /root_image
I've decided to use custom mtd layout:

Code:

root@printserver:/# cat /proc/mtd
dev:    size   erasesize  name
mtd0: 00100000 00020000 "u-boot"
mtd1: 0ff00000 00020000 "rootfs"
root@printserver:/#

I formated /dev/mdt1, attached is and create a ubi volume:

ubiformat /dev/mtd1
ubiattach -p /dev/mtd1
ubimkvol /dev/ubi0 -N rootfs -m

I then create the ubifs image with mkfs.ubifs:

mkfs.ubifs -r /root_image -o /tmp/rootfs.img -R 1MiB -e 128KiB -m 512 -c 1500

I then update the volune with the image:
ubiupdatevol /dev/ubi0_0 /tmp/rootfs.img

But when I mount it I get this error:
root@printserver:/# mount -t ubifs ubi0_0 /mnt/floppy/
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on ubi0_0,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
(for several filesystems (e.g. nfs, cifs) you might
need a /sbin/mount.<type> helper program)
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so

root@printserver:/#

Ok upon better look at dmesg it was lamenting that I issued incorrect parameters during image creation. Well I don't have any idea what would be sensible so I used stuff from examples, erroneously thinking that at worse I'd have bad performance.

After several attempts, each time correcting one option at a time, this created something I was able to write to volume and mount:
mkfs.ubifs -r /root_image -o /tmp/rootfs.img -R 2MiB -e 129024 -m 2048 -c 1500

but I still cannot boot because the initrd incorrectly parses cmdline ignoring the ubi root device spefification, replacing it with the content of rootdev in the initrd resulting in this error:

Code:

[   15.756468] UBIFS error (pid 156): ubifs_mount: cannot open "/dev/sda2", error -22
mount: mounting /dev/sda2 on /mnt failed: Invalid argument
ERROR:  No /sbin/init found on rootdev (or not mounted).  Trouble ahead.
        You can try to fix it. Type 'exit' when things are done.

/bin/sh: can't access tty; job control turned off
/ #

I think that something like this need to go in the cmdline parsin section:

Code:

root=ubi*)                                                                  
      ROOTDEV=$(echo $ARG | cut -f2- -d=)                        
    ;;

There was still more trouble ahead:
I mounted the volume manually and hoped that it would then boot but when rc.S is executed I started getting errors dew to not correctly remounting root rw and fsck.ufifs missing.

To make a dirty quick workaround I sckipped fsck on root alltogether and changed the remounting lines as follows :
# /sbin/mount -n -o remount,ro /
/sbin/mount -n -o remount,ro /dev/ubi0_0 /
# /sbin/mount -w -v -n -o remount /
/sbin/mount -w -v -n -o remount /dev/ubi0_0 /

and this got the thing booting right.
To workaround the initrd parsing problem I just recreated the initrd with "-r /dev/ubi0_0" amongst the options so that even if it's not parsed at least the content of rootdev is right.

Regards
David

drmozes · 12-29-2013, 04:44 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by louigi600

I think that something like this need to go in the cmdline parsin section:

Code:

root=ubi*)                                                                  
      ROOTDEV=$(echo $ARG | cut -f2- -d=)                        
    ;;

Did you change the cmdline though? The code in the initrd's 'init' will overwrite the defaults that the initrd was built with, if you specify root=/dev/anything - and since the ubifs (according to what you pasted in) is also under the /dev/ filesystem, the initrd should be looking for the ubi fs in the correct location.

Quote:

Originally Posted by louigi600

There was still more trouble ahead:
I mounted the volume manually and hoped that it would then boot but when rc.S is executed I started getting errors dew to not correctly remounting root rw and fsck.ufifs missing.

There is no fsck for ubifs filesystems - it doesn't exist. What needs to happen is for Slackware to skip fsck for such filesystems.
Can you see if you can get it working properly by specifying the root=/dev/ kernel cmdline? Then I'll have a look at seeing how to exclude fsck on ubifs in -current.

louigi600 · 12-29-2013, 10:05 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by drmozes

Did you change the cmdline though? The code in the initrd's 'init' will overwrite the defaults that the initrd was built with, if you specify root=/dev/anything - and since the ubifs (according to what you pasted in) is also under the /dev/ filesystem, the initrd should be looking for the ubi fs in the correct location.

There is no fsck for ubifs filesystems - it doesn't exist. What needs to happen is for Slackware to skip fsck for such filesystems.
Can you see if you can get it working properly by specifying the root=/dev/ kernel cmdline? Then I'll have a look at seeing how to exclude fsck on ubifs in -current.

Yes the comandline had the correct device in it it's just that it's not parced by the initrd init script.

Code:

root@printserver:~# cat /proc/cmdline 
console=ttyS0,115200 ubi.mtd=1 root=ubi0:rootfs rootfstype=ubifs mtdparts=orion_nand:1M(u-boot),-(rootfs)
root@printserver:~#

I had a look at that section and nothing matches ubi device in that format so it's using what's in rootdev.

Code:

# Parse command line
for ARG in $(cat /proc/cmdline); do
  case $ARG in
    0|1|2|3|4|5|6|S|s|single)
      RUNLEVEL=$ARG
    ;;
    init=*)
      INIT=$(echo $ARG | cut -f2 -d=)
    ;;
    luksdev=/dev/*)
      LUKSDEV=$(echo $ARG | cut -f2 -d=)
    ;;
    lukskey=*)
      LUKSKEY=$(echo $ARG | cut -f2- -d=)
    ;;
    rescue)
      RESCUE=1
    ;;
    resume=*)
      RESUMEDEV=$(echo $ARG | cut -f2 -d=)
    ;;
    root=/dev/*)
      ROOTDEV=$(echo $ARG | cut -f2 -d=)
    ;;
    root=LABEL=*)
      ROOTDEV=$(echo $ARG | cut -f2- -d=)
    ;;
    root=UUID=*)
      ROOTDEV=$(echo $ARG | cut -f2- -d=)
    ;;
    rootfs=*|rootfstype=*)
      ROOTFS=$(echo $ARG | cut -f2 -d=)
    ;;
    waitforroot=*|rootdelay=*)
      WAIT=$(echo $ARG | cut -f2 -d=)
    ;;
  esac
done

I suppose insetad of passing root=ubi0:rootfs I could pass root=/dev/ubi0_0 and that would probably get parsed, but Dozan's uboot environment passes the ubi root device specification the other format: adding what I suggest to the init script would allow for both formats to be correctly parsed.
Worked around that part by just recreating an initrd with a specific root device via -r flag.

Yeah .. I made changes to my rc.S to get the system to come up right. It appearts at that time that the remount with no devive specification fails, I hadto rewrite that part with something like this:
mount -o remount,rw /dev/ubi0_0 /
This is actually odd because once the system is up I can use "mount -o remount,ro /" and "mount -o remount,rw /" without issues.
maybe that got fixed after having the device specificatuon in fstab with the /dev/ubi0_0 format too.
I'll check this out better asap, but for sure now that it's working it's in the /dev/... format:

Code:

root@printserver:~# mount
proc on /proc type proc (rw,relatime)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,relatime)
tmpfs on /run type tmpfs (rw,relatime,mode=755)
devtmpfs on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,relatime,size=60180k,nr_inodes=15045,mode=755)
/dev/ubi0_0 on / type ubifs (ro,relatime)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,relatime,gid=5,mode=620,ptmxmode=000)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup type cgroup (rw,relatime,net_cls,freezer,devices,cpuacct)
root@printserver:~#

louigi600 · 12-30-2013, 09:52 AM

I did a bit more testing and things seem to work as expected if the cmdline and fstab specifies the ubi device in the /dev/ubi0_0 format.
Not sure anymore if it makes sense to have the initrd init script parse the other format if it introduces other issues.

Code:

  root@printserver:/etc# cat /proc/cmdline 
  console=ttyS0,115200 ubi.mtd=1 root=/dev/ubi0_0 rootfstype=ubifs mtdparts=orion_nand:1M(u-boot),-(rootfs)
  root@printserver:/etc# cat /etc/fstab 
  # <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
  proc             /proc           proc    defaults          0       0
  /dev/ubi0_0      /               ubifs  ro                 0       1
  root@printserver:/etc# mount
  proc on /proc type proc (rw,relatime)
  sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,relatime)
  tmpfs on /run type tmpfs (rw,relatime,mode=755)
  devtmpfs on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,relatime,size=60180k,nr_inodes=15045,mode=755)
  /dev/ubi0_0 on / type ubifs (ro,relatime)
  devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,relatime,gid=5,mode=620,ptmxmode=000)
  cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup type cgroup (rw,relatime,net_cls,freezer,devices,cpuacct)
  root@printserver:/etc#

Prior to getting these out of the live system I did a test where I let the root mount rw and it worked right withouit having to modify the remount command

Code:

    /sbin/mount -n -o remount,ro /
  #    /sbin/mount -n -o remount,ro /dev/ubi0_0 /

   echo "Remounting root device with read-write enabled."
   /sbin/mount -w -v -n -o remount /