On 06-08-22 11:45 +0100, Nick Bane wrote:
> L3 news.
> 
> I have a balloon3 with 196MB RAM using CF wifi running Debian Etch on a usb 
> memmory stick (2GB ext3 with an Etch chroot partition of about 600MB) 

Just one thing. ext3 on a CF card can be fatal to the card in less
than 10 boots. This might well be true for USB sticks too. The problem
is that every write to the device goes through the journal which is
32MB or so at the end of the device. That bit of flash can get worn
out very quickly indeed, depending on exactly what (if anything) the
controller does to avoid problems of block overuse. (They sometimes
only do this for the beginning of the device where the FAT cluster
tables go). It may be that the controllers have got smarter than they
were 2 yrs ago, but you can't easily tell...

> I put the etch debootstrap tgz on the balloonboard feed in case anyone 
> wanted a handy image.

Excellent. Where on the feed. I can't see it in last nights rsync of 
balloonboard.org::balloon Do you mean it's somewhere on husaberg?

> Problems log:
> - I was getting loads of unexpected yaffs errors but I am unclear what is 
> producing them - udev on running udevstart seemed to create a lot of output 
> about i/o errors on mtdblock0 - what is it trying to do?? If it is test 
> mounting a vfat partition or something then that might account for it. Now 
> the problems have .. err .. gone away. Perplexing.

I don't think udev does anything for mtd devices beyond ensuring that
the /dev files appear. 

> - The ext3 module seemed to loose its marbles on modprobe due to unresolved 
> names and so the ext3 partition reverts to ext2. This is fixed by building 
> ext3 into the kernel.

As explained above you'd probably be better off unfixing it and sticking with
ext2.

Wookey
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