[LEDE-DEV] Sysupgrade on Mikrotik RB912

[Sergey Ryazanov]

Hello Edwin,

On Mon, Mar 20, 2017 at 4:04 PM, Edwin van Drunen <edwin at vandrunen.net> wrote:
> * Longer story:
> The installation procedure for LEDE 17.01 on Mikrotik RB-912 boards should be as follows:
> - TFTP boot the board using the "vmlinux-initramfs.elf” image
> - scp the "squashfs-sysupgrade.bin” image to /tmp

Which exactly image did you use 'nand-64m' or 'nand-large'?

> - use sysupgrade to install the LEDE sysupgrade image
>
> After a reboot the system will always attempt to boot from the network, because a kernel can not be found.
> The MTD6 partition (previously rootfs) is now in UBI format and hosts the kernel and the root partitions inside.
> But routerboot looks for a kernel in MTD5 and (probably?) only supports YAFFS.
>
> I was able to get LEDE to boot by doing these extra steps:
> - TFTP boot an old OpenWRT initramfs image (14.07) that supports YAFFS
> - MTD erase /dev/mtd5
> - mount /dev/mtdblock5 /mnt
> - copy the LEDE LZMA kernel image to /mnt, renaming it to “kernel” and chmod a+x.
>
> The kernel loads just fine from the YAFFS partition and the rootfs is mounted using UBIFS (as overlay on squashfs), which is a big improvement over YAFFS.
> But now I will not be able to sysupgrade to a newer version of LEDE and can’t access the kernel partition, because YAFFS is not supported on LEDE.
>
> Am I missing something or is this just the way it is for now?

I test new sysupgrade with several Mikrotik boards (RB912 in
particular) and despite some ambiguous it works like a charm.

Most notable is selection of proper image from two's available:
"nand-64m" or "nand-large". You could find related discussion here
[1].

In short, you should use 'nand-64m' image for NAND with 512-bytes
pages, and 'nand-large' for NAND with 2048-bytes pages. All RB912
boards which I saw are equipped with NAND IC with 2048-bytes pages, so
the common choise for this boards is
'nand-large-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin' image.

1. Mikrotik RB411AH sysupgrade issues //
http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/lede-dev/2017-February/006195.html

-- 
Sergey