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Date:      Thu, 28 Aug 2014 13:46:21 -0700
From:      Sean Hamilton <seanhamilton@gmail.com>
To:        Stacey Son <sson@freebsd.org>
Cc:        freebsd-mips@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD 10.0-STABLE on EdgeRouter Lite notes/issues
Message-ID:  <CAL8FB_0jwWHAL6o6qqVF103O_%2B%2BGBGKNfVz=uN-Ayfj=wzZQJQ@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <FF7542EA-B008-448B-84DF-CB6F21F10A22@FreeBSD.org>
References:  <CAL8FB_0PJJQupX9Ekz=6L_rUo5Jr0J=xYO0Knb%2B_o5yf9ruYJg@mail.gmail.com> <FF7542EA-B008-448B-84DF-CB6F21F10A22@FreeBSD.org>

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On 28 August 2014 12:59, Stacey Son <sson@freebsd.org> wrote:
> Yeah, the ERL u-boot seems kind of simple.  You may have noticed that 'mk=
erlimage' puts /boot in a FAT partition.  Once the kernel is loaded you can=
 do about any partitioning scheme you want.  IDK.   It would be nice if the=
 ERL had a second USB or some onboard flash that could be used or something=
.

The ERL does have 4 MB NOR flash for u-boot, and I'm guessing most of
it is unused. You could surely put a kernel in there, if you could
make it fit. I produced a fairly minimal kernel configuration and its
.text is still >6MB, but the whole kernel xz's down to 1.8 MB, so
there's hope. I'm not sure if the flash can be written from FreeBSD,
though it can be written from u-boot.

I think it makes more sense to just dd the kernel directly to the USB
flash sans-filesystem, then use the "usb read" u-boot command to load
it. Then you don't need to worry about bricking your ERL.

>> I imagine this relates to the recent freebsd-mips posts about strip
>> corrupting static binaries.
>
> Yes, this is most likely the 'strip' bug.  See https://bugs.freebsd.org/b=
ugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=3D191587 for the details.  The workaround is to not=
 strip static libraries.

Building ports with INSTALL_TARGET=3Dinstall (instead of the default
install-strip) seems to circumvent stripping for the most part.
Building e.g. python27 still doesn't work, possibly due to the strip
issue. I'll look into the strip bug if I can find time and nobody else
is on it.

Build performance on the ERL is tolerable, so long as you consider it
to be a non-interactive process. Some builds seem like they are
probably I/O bound, though I haven't actually measured. I'm still very
interested in suggestions as to if/how FreeBSD can be made to cache
and defer FS writes. I'm considering tmpfs and a rsync cronjob if it
can't be done in the kernel.

>> [ tcpdump problem ]
>
> You should file a bugzilla bug report especially if you have a packet tra=
ce that can be used to easily reproduce the problem.

The issue is trivial to reproduce. It doesn't seem to matter what the
payload is -- it reports huge packet lengths (possibly byte swapped)
and it quickly segfaults.



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