My earlier problems with the sheevaplug all seem to have stemmed from the fact that I had installed Lenny to SDHC cards. As I mentioned in my post of 7 March, I burned through two cards before eventually giving up and trying a new installation to USB disk. This seems to have fixed the problem and my plug is now stable. I had a series of problems with the SD cards I used (class 4 SDHC 8 GB cards) which may have been related to the quality of the cards I used. Firstly the root filesystem would often appear as readonly and the USB drive holding my apt-mirror (mounted as /home2) would similarly appear to be mounted read-only. This seemed to occur about every other day and suggested to me that the plug had seen a problem of some kind and rebooted. But of course since the filesystem was not writeable, there were no logs available to help my investigations.
I persevered for around two weeks during which time I completely rebuilt both the original SD card and another with Martin’s tarball, reflashed uboot with the latest from his site, and reset the uboot environment to the factory defaults before trying again. I also changed /etc/fstab to take out the “errors=remount-ro” entry against the root filesystem, and reduced the number of writes to the card by adding “noatime, commit=180” in the hope that I could a) gain stability, and b) find out what was going wrong. No joy. I still came home to a plug with a /home2 that was either unmounted or completely unreadable or mounted RO. The disk checked out fine on another machine and I could find nothing obvious in the logs to suggest why the damned thing was failing in the first place. Martin’s site says that “USB support in u-boot is quite flaky”. My view is somewhat stronger than that, particularly when the plug boots from another device and then attaches a USB disk.
But I don’t give up easily. After getting nowhere with the SDHC card installation from Martin’s tarball, I reset the uboot environment on the plug to the factory default (again) and then ran a network installation of squeeze to a 1TB USB disk (following Martin’s howto). It took me two attempts (I hit the bug in the partitioner on the first installation) but I now have a stable plug running squeeze. It is worth noting here that I had to modify the uboot “bootcmd” environment variable to include a reset (as Martin suggests may be necessary) so that the plug will continue to retry after a boot failure until it eventually loads. The relevant line should read:
setenv bootcmd ‘setenv bootargs $(bootargs_console); run bootcmd_usb; bootm 0x00800000 0x01100000; reset’
The plug now boots successfully every second or third attempt. So far it has been up just over ten days now without any of the earlier problems recurring.
My experience appears not to be all that unusual. There has been some considerable discussion on the debian-arm list of late about problems with installation to SDHC cards. Most commentators conclude that wear levelling on the cards (particularly cheap ones) may not be very good. SD cards are sold formatted as FAT or FAT32 (depending on the capacity of the card). Modern journalling filesystems such as ext3 on linux result in much higher read/write rates and the quality of the cards becomes a much greater concern. Perhaps my cards just weren’t good enough.