[LEDE-DEV] Mikrotik RB411AH sysupgrade issues

[Felix Fietkau]

On 2017-02-21 23:10, Sergey Ryazanov wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I tried to install latest LEDE to RB411AH board. Sysupgrade worked
> fine, but device now do not boot at all. Bootloader claims that it
> could not find kernel :(
> 
> I tracked down the situation and found that the kernel partition image
> generated with assumption that any 64Mb NAND flash IC consists of
> pages, the size of which is 512 bytes with an 8-byte spare area. But
> my board equipped with Toshiba NAND flash, which consists of pages,
> the size of which is 2048 bytes with an 64-byte spare area.
> 
> Even worse, after such reflashing with the corruption of the page
> structure, kernel starts thinking that pages are bad and they could
> not be used anymore. So I had to install vendor's firmware back with
> help of vendor utility to recover pages structure.
> 
> To fix this I see several solutions:
> 
> 1. Generate more images, one for each combination of flash and page
> sizes (e.g. xxx-64m-512-sysupgrade.bin, xxxx-64m-2048-sysupgrade.bin)
> Pros: quick realization, no sysupgrade code modification
> Cons: exponential growth of number of images, unusable due to endless
> mess with this set of images.
By the way, the 64m image is only named as such, because I didn't know
that there were any devices with 64M nand and 2048 byte page size.
You should be able to flash the nand-large image on your device just fine.
To prevent flashing errors like the one you had, maybe it would be a
good first step to add metadata to the image and make sysupgrade set the
board type to nand-64m or nand-large depending on the flash parameters.

- Felix