rescue-dg

rescue-dg is bootable root file system for Kirkwood SoC devices, residing in NAND flash, produced with Buildroot-2021.05, and built completely from scratch. It has a variety of utilities and apps in it for setting up SATA/USB/MMC storage, networking, uboot environment, backup of data (rsync), cloning (dd) and recovering drive contents (ddrescue). It also makes an excellent, fast and lightweight base for running Entware.

Tested on/supports six machine types/machids (so far):

• Pogoplug V2 (aka Pink/Gray or pogo_e02)
• Pogoplug V4 (without SATA port)
• Seagate Dockstar (FreeAgent Dockstar)
• Seagate GoFlexHome/FreeAgent-GoFlexNet (these 2 devices use the same image tarball)
• Zyxel NAS-320 2-bay NAS

• ? Will your machine type be next?

  Downloads

See Releases for current available tarballs and source : click on > Assets at bottom of any release for a list of downloads.

Contents

Uses linux 5.6.5, minimized for kernel/uImage size. Utilities include:

• network : dropbear, ntpd, wget (https-capable), scp
• crypto and email: msmtp, gnutls, ca-certificates
• fdisk, gdisk; lsblk, blkid, etc.; Support for GPT
• e2fsprogs (not the busybox version)
• mtd-utils (nandwrite, ubi*, etc)
• ntfs and dosfs utils
• nfs utils
• ddrescue
• rsync
• nano
• avahi (device will advertise ssh service by its name rescue.local)
• screen
• busybox (with a wide array of functions)
• uboot support: fw_{print,set}env; bodhi's uboot.2016.05-tld-1.environment.* files in /usr/share/uboot/
• aliases:
  • ll= ls -lna
  • rmtrw={remount rootfs as rw}
  • rmtro={remount rootfs as ro}
• ...lots more...

Setup for building it:

Fulfill the basic requirements stated on the Buildroot site. On a fresh Debian 10 install, I added: apt install build-essential bc git rsync ncurses-dev libssl-dev mtd-utils geany

Note: I was in sudoers group, but which ubinize yielded nothing. I had to add /usr/sbin to my path so that ubinize would be called correctly (see custom-rs/post-processv3.sh script). ubinize is in the mtd-utils package and is essential for converting the raw rootfs.tar to a ubifs format. For me, something like export PATH="/usr/sbin:$PATH" worked, along with a simple invocation of ubinize just to test it.

mkdir $HOME/Buildroot
cd $HOME/Buildroot
wget https://github.com/buildroot/buildroot/archive/refs/tags/2021.05.tar.gz
tar xzvf 2021.05.tar.gz
cd buildroot-2021.05
wget https://github.com/davygravy/rescue-dg/archive/refs/heads/main.zip
unzip main.zip
mv rescue-dg-main/custom-rs .
rm -r rescue-dg-main/
cp custom-rs/buildroot-rs-config  .config        
cp custom-rs/busybox_v1.33.0.config package/busybox/busybox.config  
nano custom-rs/post-processv3.sh # check over paths 
# the above might not be necessary since I tried to enable relative paths
# careful here below... 
which ubinize  # if you can't see ubinize as a sudoer, then add its parent directory to your path
#  export PATH="/usr/sbin:$PATH" ; echo $PATH # look for /usr/sbin in your path...
make menuconfig  # Do a thorough sanity check for file paths; Turn on any other machids that you want to build.
                 # You can find machids of many different kirkwood boxes with this command
                 #   grep -e 'kirkwood-' output/build/linux-5.6.5/arch/arm/boot/dts/*
                 # The machid/name is entered in Kernel > "In-tree Device Tree Source file names"
make # creates the rootfs and kernel

If you change the location/naming of your directories, then you'll have to be cautious about changing the file paths in the configs and {post,pre}-process scripts. Build time with a 3.6GHz quad-core Debian box is a litle over an hour, though you can reduce that somewhat for subsequent builds by using a persistent download (dl) directory and keeping the source archive.

Output and Images from the above setup

Binaries and tarballs will be in output/images. The script post-processv3.sh will create a directory in output/images/machid for each machine variant, e.g. pogo_e02, pogoplug_series_4, etc.

The uImage.kirkwood.<machid>.mtd1.img (kernels) have the dtb appended to them, and as such, are machine-specific. This simplifies the testing and flashing of the images, and does not require the installer to make large changes to the uboot environment.

The rootfs-mtd2.img (root filesystem) are identical for all machids.

Everything you need, though, is in the rootfs-USB-kirkwood-<machid>.tar tarballs. These contain essentially the same contents as the rootfs-mtd2.img, plus /boot/uImage for that machid, and /flash_images/*.img. The idea is to boot the USB roots w/ kernel as a test on your machine. After you are satisfied with function of the kernel and rootfs, you can just cd to /flash_images/, and then flash to NAND. This way, you can try before you buy, so to speak. It is strongly advised that you use the rootfs-USB-kirkwood-\.tar tarball rootfs to test the system on your machine before flashing.

Testing and Installation on your device

The wiki section has a disclaimer and bare-bones directions for uboot changes, testing, and installation to flash. Flash at your own risk... read fully and test before you flash.