finally found some time to give comments, sorry to keep you waiting Haribo
Quick testing:
Image doesn’t fit on 4GB SD card (tried 3 different ones). 8GB worked fine.
oops i used a standard 4GB usb stick to prepare the image, need to make it a little smaller apparently to fit on standard 4GB SD card
The automounting doesn’t always work. It seem to depend a bit on the filesystem. Eventually I got it to recognise the USB stick and automount it, without resorting to SSH.
The sd card reading and writing seems to have delay sometimes and causes this kind problems I noticed that as well
The HDD is of course quite large and the system seem to have some issues with the amount of cylinders/blocks or whatever. Apart from this though, the disk was not automounted by the system at all. It was recognised as in I could check the SMART values but nothing more.
Was this disk formatted ?
After a SSH-session and formating the drive to ext4, not mounting it, it was automounted after a reboot. The free space does however fluctuate a bit. Sometimes I have 1,8TB. Sometimes roughly 700GB. And sometimes 0GB “free”. As of writing I haven’t troubleshooted this fully yet.
this seems to be related to the mount issues,
Another thing. The system never lists the disks under “USB disks”, even those that have been correctly automounted. I’m guessing this is where you’re supposed to be able to format it/mount it and such.
In the fvdw-ls raspberry setup the usb disk are classified as "internal" disks because the raspberry itself doesn't have a sata interface. We need to use the usb disk to read/write data because tSD card won't survice long if we use that as main disk and of course storing capacity is small.
In the normal fvdw-sl firmware the usb disk are mounted as one big share. This setup for the raspberry allows to create shared folders on the usb disk(s)
Suggestions:
Not that important: Autoresize the internal share to whatever the SD card can hold. Keep a warning though as to using it as a share. But people might want to use i, so let them.
yes this could be done and is on the to do list.
The firmware is on Arch Linux right? Lightweight as that might be, are there any hardware compatibility pros to using Raspbian maybe? Support for more hardware? Bigger disks? I dunno. Just saying. Raspbian isn’t that big? I already need to use a 8GB card ;) You can set the memory allocation in raspbian for headless use.
We currently only use the arch linux kernel and not the arch linux filesystem. If you use the root filesystem of arch linux you get dependency problems with several binaries as present in the firmware. The problem is not hardware but software.
The binaries in the firmware are compiled against a specific root filesystem and specific versions of libraries including the right option. I tried to run it using the arch linux root file system but it gives segmentation faults due to dependency issues.
To make it compatible with arh linux root file system, or raspbian, all of them will need to be recompiled against that root file system and missing libs need to be added..a big job.
As long as the root file system of the firmware has to be used I think there is no advantage to use a raspbian kernel.
Remark: all binaries in the firmware are compiled for arm5v. The raspberry has an arm6 processor. From what i read it should be compatible and until now it seems to work ok but maybe I overlook something.
The firmware is using glibc 2.17 and latest version of php, apache etc. so pretty well up to date
The main issue seems to be for the moment the not 100% reliability of the mounting process