Wednesday, 22 August 2007

my nslu2 runs an eabi kernel

Thanks to Riku Voipio's advice, my slug now runs an EABI kernel with OABI compat support. As a bonus I have the latest 2.6.18-5 abi kernel :-) .

Things to remember when trying to do the same with your slug:
  • running make menuconfig (somehow) with the debian/arch/arm/config-ixp4xx file as config will, most definitely disable the compilation of the internal driver
  • before flashing a new linux image, check that the drivers for the network interfaces you expect to be up after reboot are present in the deb
  • arm iptables will fail with an eabi kernel, even if it has oabi compat support, you will need to install iptables in the armel chroot; so if you use iptables at all, you need to pass that invocation to the iptables binary from the armel chroot
I just chroot-ed into an armel chroot and rrdtool made some nice and meaningful graphs.

Instead of:


I got:



Some complaints:
  • migrating to armel will probably be a pain, if care is not taken to migrate settings, scripts and everything in /etc
  • the load spikes up just to make these graphs :-(

2 comments:

David Kemp said...

I don't suppose you remember how you changed arm to armel?

eddyp said...

@David: I didn't. I kept most of my settings, /etc and personal scripts on a partition and reinstalled on another, then applied the old settings, where possible.