[LEDE-DEV] Sysupgrade on Mikrotik RB912

[Edwin van Drunen]

Hello Sergey,

My RB912 boards came with 2048-byte pages and I installed the nand-large image, specifically:
https://downloads.lede-project.org/releases/17.01.0/targets/ar71xx/mikrotik/lede-17.01.0-r3205-59508e3-ar71xx-mikrotik-nand-large-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin

I have installed it on 23 boards so far and none would boot after a regular sysupgrade.
They all needed the kernel partition (MTD5) to be formatted to YAFFS and the kernel manually copied.
I used this initramsfs image:
https://downloads.lede-project.org/releases/17.01.0/targets/ar71xx/mikrotik/lede-17.01.0-r3205-59508e3-ar71xx-mikrotik-vmlinux-initramfs.elf

This problem and the solution were mentioned before on this mailing list, but I never got a definite answer on if this is normal behaviour.
Now I am curious to know if your boards are maybe different or there is some other small detail I am not getting right.

Met vriendelijke groet / With kind regards,

Edwin van Drunen

> On 9 Apr 2017, at 18:37, Sergey Ryazanov <ryazanov.s.a at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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

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