Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite works multi-user with -CURRENT.
Juli Mallett
jmallett at FreeBSD.org
Thu Jan 24 02:22:37 UTC 2013
Folks,
Just wanted to let everyone know that what's in -CURRENT now boots
happily to multiuser on the EdgeRouter Lite. The big challenge is
getting a file system on the onboard storage. I didn't want to use
Ubiquiti's Linux to do it for what are probably spurious reasons, so I
ended up loading a huge kernel with tftp which had an MFS embedded in
it. On the MFS, I placed pretty much just /rescue. I used netcat and
dd to splat an image onto the disk, with a FAT /boot partition on
slice 1 and a UFS / partition on slice 2.
In U-Boot, I then changed the bootcmd to:
"fatload usb 0 0 /kernel/kernel; bootoctlinux 0 coremask=0x3"
It happily boots multi-user with networking, etc. Just uncomment the
OCTEON_VENDOR_UBIQUITI option in the OCTEON1 kernel config and change
the root device to "ufs:da0s2".
It seems like it would be nice to script the creation of an image one
could TFTP boot which could then pull down a disk image off the web
and dd it to the disk. Then we could produce "installers" of a sort
for Octeon (and other MIPS) systems with ease with a cron job or
something. I probably won't get around to doing this, but wanted to
suggest it as a nice way of being able to install systems like this.
Especially with how cheap the EdgeRouter Lite is, it seems like a
useful piece of evangelism. Heck, since U-Boot claims to support use
of a gateway, you could even have a TFTP server on the Internet and
let people download the installer that way, too, with just a few
commands in U-Boot.
If anyone needs help getting FreeBSD going on EdgeRouter Lite or other
Octeon systems, they should feel free to contact me. I don't have
much time, but this is at least something I've gotten down pretty
well.
Thanks,
Juli.
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