[flashboot] flashboot on Soekris 4826

[Charles Musser]

Yep, that's the way to do it. You PXEboot a bsd.rd, drop into the shell, then use FTP and "dd" to blast the image onto the flash device. And yeah, reading build-diskimage.sh is very instructive. I had deduced a fair amount of what needed to be done, but there are several things in there that I probably wouldn't have figured out in a reasonable amount of time.

After a couple of days of fooling around with it (with some very generous online help from another list member), I got it going. I started out with those pre-built images (the ones you mention that are based on 5.0), then built my own image by cloning Flashboot from Github, running the scripts and tweaking them slightly to add some additional stuff. It all works. The images I built are based on 5.2. I would have tried 5.3, but my build machine is a virtual host and there was supposedly some difficulty getting 5.3 to work reliably on whatever virtualization they're using.

So my initial question about getting the stuff onto the 4826 has been answered, and now I'm moving on to further customization. One big mystery is how to build a system that's "read-write", i.e.. not based entirely on a ramdisk and a "flash" partiion mounted read-only. But that's a new topic entirely.

Eventually, I'll post a writeup on how I did it, along with some more general "overview" material that may be useful for the project documentation.

Chuck


On Jun 15, 2013, at 6:34 AM, John Makosky wrote:

> Chuck,
> 
> It should be possible to PXE boot to a bsd.rd kernel (or maybe directly
> to a flashboot kernel?), and then use dd to install a flashboot image to
> your flash memory.  Admittedly, I have never tried this. 
> 
> You could also roll your own very basic boot environment, and transfer a
> flashboot kernel, as you've been trying.  More information can be found
> at https://github.com/openbsd/flashboot/blob/master/README.md. 
> https://github.com/openbsd/flashboot/blob/master/build-diskimage.sh is a
> nice encapsulation of what you would need to do with your flash device
> to make it work, or to roll your own image.
> 
> At this point, the image files and kernels on Github are based on
> OpenBSD 5.0, and no longer supported.  There has been some activity to
> update Flashboot to version 5.3, but it does not seem to be ready, yet. 
> I have reported a couple bugs, and am waiting for a little help to get
> them fixed.  Good luck!
> 
> -John
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