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Arch Linux live USB for B3 (with Linux 3.17.1) released

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sakaki
Posts: 172
Joined: 15 Aug 2014, 11:20

Arch Linux live USB for B3 (with Linux 3.17.1) released

Post by sakaki »

Hello,

as I've had quite a few people email me requesting this, I've put together a live-USB image of Arch Linux for the B3 on GitHub (here). It uses a 'vanilla' version of the 3.17.1 kernel, with the systemd essentials turned on. As before, the necessary code to temporarily switch off the L2 cache during boot has been prepended, and the kirkwood-b3 device tree blob appended - so it should work on any 'stock' B3.

You can burn the supplied image to a USB key (>=4GB), then boot your B3 from it, without affecting any installed system on your B3's hard drive. You can even boot a diskless B3! No soldering, compilation or U-Boot flashing is required.

It's a full (persistent) armv5te Arch Linux system, based on the archlinuxarm.org 3 Oct 2014 kirkwood image, so you can run pacman operations (Arch Linux's equivalent of apt-get) etc. immediately.

Full instructions are provided on the GitHub page (including how to specify initial network settings, so you can ssh in once booted, and how to install Arch Linux on your B3's internal hard drive too, in case you want to do that).

Let me know how you get on! I don't use Arch much (Gentoo's my distro, as you may have guessed ^-^) so if you find any snafus in there, pls ping me an email, or append to this thread, so I can get a chance to fix them.

best,

sakaki
sakaki
Posts: 172
Joined: 15 Aug 2014, 11:20

Re: Arch Linux live USB for B3 (with Linux 3.17.1) released

Post by sakaki »

If you are running the current Arch live-USB on your B3, be sure to add a udev rule to switch off TCP segmentation offload (see this post for more detail). You'll get the odd instance of data corruption (during large data transfers over Ethernet) otherwise.

To do this, first update your package metadata:

Code: Select all

[root@archb3 ~]# pacman -Sy
   (confirm if prompted)
Then download the ethtool package:

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[root@archb3 ~]# pacman -S ethtool
   (confirm if prompted)
Create a new udev rule:

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[root@archb3 ~]# nano -w /etc/udev/rules.d/50-marvell-fix-tso.rules
and put the following text in that file:

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# Disable Marvell TCP segmentation offload due to bugs
# See e.g. http://archlinuxarm.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=7692&start=20
ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="net", KERNEL=="eth[0-1]", RUN+="/usr/sbin/ethtool -K %k tso off"
Save the file and exit nano. Once you reboot, tso will be disabled.

Best, sakaki

PS this workaround is already in the latest Gentoo live-USB for the B3 (but didn't make it into the current Arch release, hence the reason you need to make the fix yourself). The B2 uses a different Ethernet driver, and so is unaffected.
anat
Posts: 11
Joined: 22 Oct 2011, 15:11

Re: Arch Linux live USB for B3 (with Linux 3.17.1) released

Post by anat »

sakaki wrote: It uses a 'vanilla' version of the 3.17.1 kernel, with the systemd essentials turned on. As before, the necessary code to temporarily switch off the L2 cache during boot has been prepended, and the kirkwood-b3 device tree blob appended - so it should work on any 'stock' B3.

...

It's a full (persistent) armv5te Arch Linux system, based on the 3 Oct 2014 kirkwood image, so you can run pacman operations (Arch Linux's equivalent of apt-get) etc. immediately.
So the changes you've done to the image, won't get lost, no matter what packages get updated by pacman?
sakaki
Posts: 172
Joined: 15 Aug 2014, 11:20

Re: Arch Linux live USB for B3 (with Linux 3.17.1) released

Post by sakaki »

Yes, that's correct - the important changes have been made to the kernel, and those won't get overwritten by pacman, given the current setup. See the project page on GitHub for further details.

Best, sakaki
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