[Soc-coordination] MTD embedded onboard flash partitioning and installation, report, week 4

[Per Andersson]

Hi!

Sorry that I missed the meeting yesterday, I was in the Stockholm
Archipelago celebrating mid-summer.

In short:
0) Include custom (partman) udebs in d-i.
1) Kernel udebs: include mtd, ubi and ubifs modules.
2) partman-base recognizes MTD devices.
3) partman-ubi: created udeb, initial steps towards scanning for ubi
   volumes.

The long story:
0) The past two weeks I have been battling with d-i build process to
include the custom udebs (modified existing partman udebs). When
I finally got them included on a d-i image, I hit a wall with cyclic
dependencies between partman packages. Thanks to Colin Watson,
who solved this. [0]

1) I have compiled a custom kernel (2.6.29-486) where I enabled mtd,
ubi, ubifs and nandsim modules. I downloaded linux-kernel-di-i386-2.6
source package and modified modules to include. (This source package
use kernel-wedge to split up the kernel package into udebs.)

2) partman-base ignored MTD flash device files. This check was
removed and MTD flash now shows up in the partition dialog.

I also tested parted_devices /dev/mtd0, which found the device and
reported the size correctly.

3) Packaging files added. A few skeleton scripts in init.d added. Next
two weeks work will be focused on this part.


Next two weeks:
* Figure out when and how to load required modules (so disk-detect can
  recognize MTD flash without manual loading of mtdblock and mtdchar).
* Create udeb of mtd-utils, which will be used for actually creating
  UBI volumes and format them with UBIFS.
* Create (parted) device files for MTD flash.
* Make partman-ubi create UBI volumes.
* Prepare for midterm evaluation.


All the best,
Per

[0] http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2009/06/msg00107.html