plugout.net

Dear All,

As a somewhat linux noob, but always eager to learn, a question popped up in my mind while I was cursing at the very bad, very limited and ancient firmware on one of my older NASses. The device is a Netgear Readynas rnd2000 based on a spark cpu and sporting 256mb of ram (expandable to 1Gb). But Netgear has abandoned the device since a long time and the stock firmware.. well... it sucks. It is extremely limited, dog slow, user-unfriendly, etcetera. This in absolute contrast to the FvdW firmware that is running on my other lacie devices. The support is almost absurdly well and very fast. I think it rivals many commercial offerings. So thanks a lot for the hard work! It is really appreciated.
But what would it take to 'convert' the firmware to a different device and hardware? Debian can run on the netgear and the bootloader is documented (i think) so a lot of info about the hardware can be gathered from the console. Can it be done? And what would it take? Weeks and weeks of an expert's time to get something running - even a basic kernel (my guess) or should it be somewhat less problematic? Not that I have that much time on my hands or even have a fraction of the expertise needed. But I was wondering about it. How much time does it take FvdW & Co. to convert the firmware to running state for even a somewhat alike different lacie device?

Greetings and thanks

Hi swanswan_h,

If it is a device based on an arm processor (type 5 or 6) it is easy. But if it has a different cpu then it takes much more then only a kernel for that socket and cpu. All linux binaries in the firmware and programs must be recompiled for that processor. A big job...

But as said if the device has an arm5 or 6 processor then it requires a kernel for the socket (mainboard) used and figuring out how the bootloader loads kernel and the root file system. Recently we released a version of fvdw-sl for the Raspberry Pi model b. The raspberry has an arm6 processor