Compact Flash Boot- MTD

Do you have a question? Post it now! No Registration Necessary

Translate This Thread From English to

Threaded View
caryon Contact options for registered users 's Avatar (by Gravatar) posted on
January 28, 2006, 6:20 am
rate this thread
Reply to this post Reply Tag this thread to save it in your account Save Printer-friendly version of this post Print
Hi,

We are working to develop an embedded system.  We are using a small
motherboard (SBC), 3.5" form factor from Axiom.  This motherboard
features a compact flash slot on the bottom that acts as an IDE drive.

We are using (and need) a 4GB Sandisk CF card.  But, we are having
troubles booting various Linux distributions.  For example. Fedora Core
4 will get to the hardware detection, and freeze at hda detection with
a message 'cache flushes not supported'.  This same thing happens with
Redhat 7.1, Debian, and SUSE.

If I try one of the live CD's like DSL or Knoppix, it detects hda
compact flash and boots just fine.  I am even able to write to it.

I am wondering if any of you out there know why, or if you can confirm
my suspicion that certain MTDs (memory technology devices) modules are
not complied into Fedora, for example, but do exsist in the Knoppix or
DSL distros.  If anyone out there has some advice or experience with
MTD and the kernels, I'd appreciate some comments.

Thank you in advance.


Other Related Threads
Ernst Murnleitner Contact options for registered users 's Avatar (by Gravatar) posted on
January 28, 2006, 1:41 pm
Permalink
Reply to this post Reply Tag this thread to save it in your account Save Printer-friendly version of this post Print
Re: Compact Flash Boot- MTD

Hello,

try to use another brand, e.g. Toshiba.

I made the experience that some embedded devices to not work with some
brands of CF. There were various symptoms. Maybe the error message is
just a result of somewhat else.

Greetings
Ernst

Other Related Threads
Robert Kaiser Contact options for registered users 's Avatar (by Gravatar) posted on
January 28, 2006, 2:15 pm
Permalink
Reply to this post Reply Tag this thread to save it in your account Save Printer-friendly version of this post Print
Re: Compact Flash Boot- MTD
     snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com writes:
Quoted text here. Click to load it

I doubt the MTD layer has anything to do with this. CF devices,
though they use flash memory internally, behave like ordinary IDE
disk drives at the hardware interface and thus the responsible driver
in Linux would be the IDE driver.

I have not seen problems like the ones you describe above, so I'm
afraid I cannot really help. My guess, however is that the distros
that work (i.e. Knoppix/DSL) use a different IDE driver/kernel revision
than the ones that do not work.

Why not just use Knoppix? It is Debian-based and it can be installed
on a harddisk, AFAIK.

Rob

--
Robert Kaiser                     email: rkaiser AT sysgo DOT com
SYSGO AG                          http://www.elinos.com
We've slightly trimmed the long signature. Click to see the full one.
caryon Contact options for registered users 's Avatar (by Gravatar) posted on
January 28, 2006, 4:56 pm
Permalink
Reply to this post Reply Tag this thread to save it in your account Save Printer-friendly version of this post Print
Re: Compact Flash Boot- MTD
Thank you for your posts so far.  I have tired other vendors- they do
the same thing.  Interesting though is the size of the card matters-
anything up to 512MB works.

We may have to use Knoppix, but the reason why I wanted to use Fedora
was becasue of the camera device we will be attaching via USB- the
vendor only developed drivers for Fedora.


Site Timeline