Thu Sep 22 00:12:42 BST 2022 Making quite reasonable progress, though only running under emulation. Since almost everything so far has been a recap of nixwrt, that's to be expected. The example config starts some services at boot, or at least attempts to. Next we shoud - add some network config to run-qemu - implement udhcp and odhcp properly to write outputs and create resolv.conf and all that - write some kind of test so we can refactor the crap - not let the tests write random junk everywhere Thu Sep 22 12:46:36 BST 2022 We can store outputs in the s6 scan directory, it seems: > There is, however, a guarantee that s6-supervise will never touch subdirectories named data or env. So if you need to store user information in the service directory with the guarantee that it will never be mistaken for a configuration file, no matter the version of s6, you should store that information in the data or env subdirectories of the service directory. https://skarnet.org/software/s6/servicedir.html > process 'store/pj0b27l5728cypa5mmagz0q8ibzpik0h-execline-mips-unknown-linux-musl-2.9.0.1-bin/bin/execlineb' started with executable stack https://skarnet.org/lists/skaware/1550.html Thu Sep 22 16:14:49 BST 2022 what network peers do we want to model for testing? - wan: pppoe - wan: ip over ethernet, w/ dhcp service provided - wan: l2tp over (ip over ethernet, w/ dhcp service provided) - lan: something with a dhcp client https://accel-ppp.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ could use this for testing pppoe and l2tp? Thu Sep 22 22:57:47 BST 2022 To build a nixos vm with accel-ppp installed (not yet configured) nix-build '' -A vm -I nixos-config=./tests/ppp-server-configuration.nix -o ppp-server QEMU_OPTS="-display none -serial mon:stdio -nographic" ./ppp-server/bin/run-nixos-vm To test it's configured I thought I'd run it against an OpenWrt qemu install, so, fun with qemu networking ensues. This config in ../openwrt-qemu is using two multicast socket networks - nix-shell -p qemu --run "./run.sh ./openwrt-22.03.0-x86-64-generic-kernel.bin openwrt-22.03.0-x86-64-generic-ext4-rootfs.img " so hopefully we can spin up other VMs connected either to its lan or its wan: *however* we do first need to configure its wan to use pppoe uci set network.wan=interface uci set network.wan.device='eth1' uci set network.wan.proto='pppoe' uci set network.wan.username='db123@a.1' uci set network.wan.password='NotReallyTheSecret' (it's ext4 so this will probably stick) Fri Sep 23 10:27:22 BST 2022 * mcast=230.0.0.1:1234 : access (interconnect between router and isp) * mcast=230.0.0.1:1235 : lan * mcast=230.0.0.1:1236 : world (the internet) Sun Sep 25 20:56:28 BST 2022 TODO - bugs, missing bits, other infelicities as they occur to me: DONE 1) shutdown doesn't work as its using the busybox one not s6. 2) perhaps we shouldn't have process-based services like dhcp, ppp implement "address provider interface" - instead have a separate service for interface address that depends on the service and uses its output * ppp is not like dhcp because dhcp finds addresses for an existing interface but ppp makes a new one 3) when I killed ppp it restarted, but I don't think it reran defaultroute which is supposed to depend on it. (Might be important e.g. if we'd been assigned a different IP address). Investigate semantics of s6-rc service dependencies DONE 4) make the pppoe test run unattended 5) write a test for udhcp 6) squashfs size is ~ 14MB for a configuration with not much in it, look for obvious wastes of space 7) some of the pppoe config should be moved into a ppp service 8) some of configuration.nix (e.g. defining routes) should be moved into tools DONE 9) split tools up instead of having it all one file 10) is it OK to depend on squashfs pseudofiles if we might want to switch to ubifs? will there always be a squashfs underneath? might we want to change the pseudofiles in an overlay? 11) haven't done (overlayfs) overlays at all 12) overlay.nix needs splitting up 13) upgrade ppp to something with an ipv6-up-script option 14) add ipv6 support generally 15) "ip address add" seems to magically recognise v4 vs v6 but is that specified or fluke? 16) tighten up the module specs. (DONE) services.foo should be a s6-rc service, (DONE) kernel config should be checked in some way DONE 17) rename nixwrt references in kernel builder 18) maybe stop suffixing all the service names with .service 19) syslogd - use busybox or s6? chat -s -S ogin:--ogin: root / "ip address show dev ppp0 | grep ppp0" 192.168.100.1 "/nix/store/*-s6-linux-init-*/bin/s6-linux-init-hpr -p" Working towards a general goal of having a derivation we can usefully run `nix path-info` on - or some other tool that will tell us what's making the images big. The squashfs doesn't have this information. Towards that end (really? can't remember how ...) what would be a way for packages to declare "I want to add files to /etc"? Is that even a good idea? Thinking we should turn s6-init-files back into a real derivation. Tue Sep 27 00:31:45 BST 2022 > Thinking we should turn s6-init-files back into a real derivation. This turns out to be Not That Simple, because it contains weird shit (sticky bits and fifos). Tue Sep 27 09:50:44 BST 2022 * allow modules to register activation scripts that are run on the root filesystem once all packages are installed - do they run on build or on host? if we're upgrading in place how do we ship filesystem changes to the host? or: * allow modules to declare environment.*, use pseudofile on build and create real files on host. will need to keep the implementation on host faily simple because restricted environment Tue Sep 27 16:14:18 BST 2022 TODO list is getting both longer and shorter, though longer on average. 2) perhaps we shouldn't use process-based services like [ou]dhcp as queryable endpoint for interface addresses (e.g. when adding routes). Instead have a separate service for interface address that depends on the *dhcp and uses its output 3) when I killed ppp it restarted, but I don't think it reran defaultroute which is supposed to depend on it. (Might be important e.g. if we'd been assigned a different IP address). Investigate semantics of s6-rc service dependencies 4) figure out a nice way to fit ppp into this model as it actually creates the interface instead of using an existing unconfigured one 5) write a test for udhcp 7) some of the pppoe config should be moved into a ppp service 11) haven't done (overlayfs) overlays at all 13) upgrade ppp to something with an ipv6-up-script option, move ppp and pppoe derivations into their own files 14) add ipv6 support generally 15) "ip address add" seems to magically recognise v4 vs v6 but is that specified or fluke? 19) ship logs somehow to log collection system 21) dhcp, dns, hostap service for lan 22) support real hardware Tue Sep 27 22:00:36 BST 2022 Found the cause of huge image size: rp-pppoe ships with scripts that reference build-time packages, so we have x86-64 glibc in there We don't need syslog just to accommodate ppp, there's an underdocumented option for it to log to a file descriptor Wed Sep 28 16:04:02 BST 2022 Based on https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/431953 if we can forge ethernet packets we might be able to write tests for e.g. "is the vm running a dhcp server" Wed Sep 28 21:29:05 BST 2022 We can use Python "scapy" to generate dhcp request packets, and Python 'socket' model to send them encapsulated in UDP. Win It's extremely janky python Thu Sep 29 15:24:37 BST 2022 Two points to ponder 1) where service config depends on outputs of other services, we do that rather ugly "$(cat ${output ....})" construct. Can we improve on that? Maybe we could have some kind of tooling to read them as environment variables ... 2) we have given no consideration yet to secrets. we want the secrets to be not in the store; we want some way of refreshing them when they change Sat Oct 1 14:24:21 BST 2022 The MAC80211_HWSIM kernel config creates virtual wlan[01] devices which hostapd will work with, and a hwsim0 which we can use to monitor (though not inject) trafic. Could we use this for wifi tests? How do we make the guest hwsim0 visible to the host? Sat Oct 1 18:41:31 BST 2022 virtual serial ports: I struggled with qemu for ages to get this to work. You also need the unhelpfully named CONFIG_VIRTIO_CONSOLE option in kconfig QEMU_OPTIONS="-nodefaults -chardev socket,path=/tmp/wlan,server=on,wait=off,id=wlan -device virtio-serial-pci -device virtserialport,name=wlan,chardev=wlan" Sun Oct 2 09:34:48 BST 2022 We could implement the secrets store as a service, then the secrets are outputs. Things we can do in qemu 1) make interface address service that depends on dhcp, instead of being set by it directly 2) check out restart behaviour of dependent services when depended-on service dies 3) pppd _creates_ an interface, work out how to fit it into this model 5) add bridge support for lan 8) upgrade ppp to something with an ipv6-up-script option, move ppp and pppoe derivations into their own files 9) get ipv6 address from pppoe 10) get ipv6 delegation from pppoe and add prefix to lan 11) support dhcp6 in dnsmasq, and advertise prefix on lan 12) firewalling and nat - default deny or zero trust? 14) write secrets holder as a service with outputs 20) should we check that references to outputs actually correspond with those provided by a service Things we probably do on hardware 6) writable filesystem (ubifs?) 7) overlay with squashfs/ubifs - useful? think about workflows for how this thing is installed 16) gl-ar750 17) mediatek device - gl-mt300 or whatever I have lying around 18) some kind of arm (banana pi router?) 19) should we give routeros a hardware ethernet and maybe an l2tp upstream, then we could dogfood the hardware devices. we could run an l2tp service at mythic-beasts, got a /48 there https://skarnet.org/software/s6/s6-fghack.html looks like a handy thing we hope we'll never have to use Sun Oct 2 22:22:17 BST 2022 > make interface address service that depends on dhcp, instead of being set by it directly We can do this for dhcp, but we can't do it for ppp. Running the ppp service creates a ppp[012n] interface and assigns it an ipv4 address and there's not a whole lot we can easily do to unbundle that. So - the ppp service needs to behave as if it were a "link" service - either it *also* needs to behave as an address service, or we could have an address service that subscribes to it and does nothing other than translate output formats Note regarding that second bullet: at the moment the static address service has no outputs anyway! Tue Oct 4 22:43:02 BST 2022 While trying to make the TFTP workflow not awful I seem to have written a TFTP server. Thu Oct 6 19:26:40 BST 2022 We have a booting kernel on gl-ar750, but we aren't at a point that it can find a root filesystem I'd *like* to be able to use the same delivery mechanism (kernel uimage concatenated monolithic Sat Oct 8 11:12:09 BST 2022 We have it booting on hardware, mounting root fs, running getty :-) For NixWRT TFTP boots we used a single image with both kernel and squashfs, and relied on CONFIG_MTD_SPLIT_FIRMWARE to identify where the boundary was and create /dev/mdtn devices at the right offsets so that the kernel could find the squashfs For Liminix we're not going to do that. * CONFIG_MTD_SPLIT_FIRMWARE is only available in OpenWrt patches * it's an uncomfortable level of automagic just to save us doing two TFTPs instea of one * the generated image is anyway not the one we'd write to flash (has unneeded PHRAM support) * it means we need to memmap out enough ram for the whole image inc kernel when really all we need to reserve is the rootfs bit Sat Oct 8 11:23:08 BST 2022 "halt" and "reboot" don't work on gl-ar750 Sat Oct 8 13:10:00 BST 2022 Where do we go with this ar750? - wired networking - wifi Sun Oct 9 09:57:35 BST 2022 We want to be able to package kernel modules as regular derivations, so that they get added to the filesystem This means they need access to kernel.modulesupport This means kernel.modulesupport needs to be in pkgs too? This is fine, probably, but we'd like to avoid closing over vmlinux because there's no need for it to be in the filesystem Mon Oct 10 22:57:23 BST 2022 The problem is that kernel kconfig options are manipulated in the liminix modules, which means that data must be (transitively) available to modules, so they can't be regular packages as they're tied so tightly to the exact config. Unless we define a second overlay that references the configuration object, but my head hurts when I start to think about that so maybe not. Tue Oct 11 00:00:13 BST 2022 Building ag71xx (ethernet driver) as a module doesn't work because it references a symbol ath79_pll_base in the kernel that hasn't been marked with EXPORT_SYMBOL. We could forge an object file that "declares" it with a gross and disgusting hack like this $ echo > empty # not actually "empty", objcopy complains about that $ grep ath79_pll_base /nix/store/jcc114cd13xa8aa4mil35rlnmxnlmv09-vmlinux-mips-unknown-linux-musl-modulesupport/System.map ffffffff807b2094 B ath79_pll_base $ mips-unknown-linux-musl-objcopy -I binary -O elf32-big --add-section .bss=empty --add-symbol ath79_pll_base=.bss:0x807b2094 empty f.o I don't claim this is a good idea, just an idea. Thought was that we would not have to declare its type this way. Also it might not work with kaslr https://stackoverflow.com/a/68903503 Backstory: why are we trying to build this as a module? because the openwrt fork of it seems to be a bit more advanced than the mainline, and I *suspect* that the mainline version doesn't work with our openwrt-based device tree which ahs the mdio as a nested node inside the ag71xx node - in mainline the driver seems to have all the mdio stuff inline. So, could we build the openwrt driver without patching the crap out of our kernel Sun Oct 16 15:25:33 BST 2022 Executive decision: let's use the openwrt kernel (at least for gl-ar750). Mainline kernel doesn’t have devicetree support for this device or the SoC it’s based on, and the OpenWrt dts for it doesn’t have the same "compatible"s, which makes me think that an indefinite amount of patching will be necessary to make dts/modules for one of them work with a kernel for the other As a result: now we have eth0 appearing, but not eth1? Guessing we need to add some kconfig for the switch Mon Oct 17 21:23:37 BST 2022 we are spending ridiculous amounts of cpu/io time copying kernel source trees from place to place, because we have kernel tree preparation and actual building as two separate derivations. I think the answer is to have a generic kernel build derivation in the overlay, and then have the device overlays override it with an additional phase to do openwrt patching or whatever else they need to do. Tue Oct 18 23:02:43 BST 2022 * previous TODO list is Aug 02, need to review * dts is hardcoded to gl-ar750, that needs cleaning up * figure out persistent addresses for ethernet * fix halt/reboot * "link" services have a "device" attribute, would much rather have everything referenced using outputs than having two different mechanisms for reading similar things * Kconfig.local do we still need it? * check all config instead of differentiating config/checkedConfig Sun Feb 5 18:14:02 GMT 2023 We have resumed. commit eb4efab6a215bf03cf5aab10d4ac909e83e9c148 Author: Daniel Barlow Date: Sat Jan 28 23:18:28 2023 +0000 * find out what works * add that stuff to hydra * fix the rest * add that stuff to hydra * convert to flake * check if routeros can be run interactively * some per-device docs in a form that can be transcluded for website ci builds * each of the tests has hardcoded device/config/etc * build an "empty" configuration for each target device * build an unstable configuration for qemu Wed Feb 8 16:52:22 GMT 2023 We have hydra builds for all the previously-working devices, though we don't yet know if any of those builds actually boots or does anything useful. [DONE] Would be nice to clean up the run-qemu and connect-qemu scripts and put them in the buildEnv Some thought needed about how to hook up the gl-ar750 to the internets, ideally in a way that mirrors typical real uses. AAISP have an L2TP service, but I would prefer to use pppoe on the device, so how to translate one to t'other on an intermediary/gateway machine? https://www.rfc-archive.org/getrfc.php?rfc=3817#gsc.tab=0 exists as an RFC but I can't find anything that actually implements it Actual Documentation (e.g. user and developer manuals) should live in the liminix repo so it corresponds with the code, and can be rsynced from there to the web site, maybe with a deploy hook or something. Haven't decided what a good doc format is yet If we create a flake for Hydra to run on, that _more or less_ means we don't have any manual hydra jobset configuration to document. There are still some tests that need adding to CI [DONE] Should the per-device config be a module not an overlay? Given that half of what's in it is kernel config (a module could set this) and the rest is source tarball download specs (needs nixpkgs, a module has this and could set it too) I wonder why it isn't already [ALREADY DOES] Can we make Hydra report output sizes so we can plot closure size trends and see if it all goes awful? Thu Feb 9 08:14:39 GMT 2023 For better developer experience, I am thinking that either (1) swap tasks 2 and 3 (writable filesystem before module system) or (2) add NBD support so I can iterate on a real device without full rebuilds every time Fri Feb 10 06:18:25 PM GMT 2023 did the overlay->module thing [DONE] Need to fix all the configuration around PHRAM, I can't see how it would ever work Sat Feb 11 14:37:45 GMT 2023 Consolidated TODO * figure out persistent addresses for ethernet (?) [SEEMS DONE] * fix halt/reboot [DONE, NO] * Kconfig.local do we still need it? [DONE] * check all config instead of differentiating config/checkedConfig Things we can do in qemu * "link" services have a "device" attribute, would much rather have everything referenced using outputs than having two different mechanisms for reading similar things 1) make interface address service that depends on dhcp, instead of being set by it directly 2) check out restart behaviour of dependent services when depended-on service dies 3) pppd _creates_ an interface, work out how to fit it into this model 5) add bridge support for lan 8) upgrade ppp to something with an ipv6-up-script option, move ppp and pppoe derivations into their own files 9) get ipv6 address from pppoe 10) get ipv6 delegation from pppoe and add prefix to lan 11) support dhcp6 in dnsmasq, and advertise prefix on lan 12) firewalling and nat - default deny or zero trust? 14) write secrets holder as a service with outputs 20) should we check that references to outputs actually correspond with those provided by a service * Actual Documentation (e.g. user and developer manuals) * make a flake * There are still some tests that need adding to CI Things we probably do on hardware [DONE] * dts is hardcoded to gl-ar750, that needs cleaning up 6) writable filesystem (ubifs?) 7) overlay with squashfs/ubifs - useful? think about workflows for how this thing is installed 16) gl-ar750 [DONE] * decide how to hook up the gl-ar750 to the internets 17) mediatek device - gl-mt300 or whatever I have lying around 18) some kind of arm (banana pi router?) [DONE DIFERENTLY] 19) should we give routeros a hardware ethernet and maybe an l2tp upstream, then we could dogfood the hardware devices. we could run an l2tp service at mythic-beasts, got a /48 there Sat Feb 11 15:57:31 GMT 2023 The reason we would like to run PPPoE instead of L2TP on the "rotuer" device is - closer to real world scenario - means no need to run dhcp client on the wan interface before we even get to start the l2tpd Sun Feb 12 14:57:28 GMT 2023 https://github.com/katalix/go-l2tp#kpppoed Mon Feb 13 04:44:09 PM GMT 2023 if the gl-ar750 is connected to an ethernet card that linux is ignoring, we're going to have to set up _some_ qemu thing just to run tftp from. Tue Feb 14 17:59:34 GMT 2023 We should do a derivation that creates an ISO image and a qemu shell script based on a configuration.nix, and put it in buildEnv. We'll call it "borderNetVm" : > A broadband remote access server (BRAS, B-RAS or BBRAS) routes traffic to and from broadband remote access devices such as digital subscriber line access multiplexers (DSLAM) on an Internet service provider's (ISP) network.[1][2] BRAS can also be referred to as a broadband network gateway or border network gateway (BNG).[3] (for consistency we should rename the "access" qemu socket network to match whatever we call this) rm border.qcow2 ; nix-shell --argstr liminix `pwd` --argstr nixpkgs `pwd`/../nixpkgs --argstr unstable `pwd`/../unstable-nixpkgs/ ci.nix -A buildEnv --run "run-border-vm" Wed Feb 15 22:56:59 GMT 2023 configuration for border vm needs to come from somewhere so it's good for more people than just me - pci device for setting up the ethernet - lns address - uid so it can do 9p shares? do we need to map things here? also need to document the host-side bits so that people can set up their spare ethernet as vfio next step for hacking is to figure out what I was doing with pppoe Wed Feb 15 22:59:56 GMT 2023 docs ... * introduction * user guide ** how to build it ** how to flash it on your device ** what to put in configuration.nix ** modules * developer guide ** building/running with qemu *** emulated upstream ** building/running on hardware *** run in place with TFTP *** emulated upstream ** CI ** Roadmap ** Contributing nix-shell -p sphinx --run "make -C doc html" https://francis.begyn.be/blog/nixos-home-router contains information about avahi reflector Fri Feb 17 00:09:34 GMT 2023 29 11.282085831 81.187.76.242 → 8.8.8.8 ICMP 106 Echo (ping) request id=0x0187, seq=2/512, 4 30 11.286314642 90.155.53.19 → 81.187.76.242 ICMP 78 Destination unreachable (Communication admin) We're getting packets over the pppoe-l2tp relay thing. Just have to work out now why we're not routing Fri Feb 17 16:54:41 GMT 2023 Haha. We weren't routing because we'd used the wrong CHAP password Fri Feb 17 16:58:27 GMT 2023 This TODO is for nlnet task 1 and for bits of subsequent tasks that are annoying enough that I might poke at them anyway: 1) gl-ar750, why do we get "ag71xx 19000000.eth: invalid MAC address, using random address" 2) gl-ar750, wifi 3) document services so I can remember how they work. Refer back to Oct 18 for notes that no longer make sense 4) check out restart behaviour of dependent services when depended-on service dies 5) pppd _creates_ an interface, work out how to fit it into this model 6) add bridge support for lan 7) upgrade ppp to something with an ipv6-up-script option, move ppp and pppoe derivations into their own files 8) get ipv6 address from pppoe 9) get ipv6 delegation from pppoe and add prefix to lan 10) support dhcp6 in dnsmasq, and advertise prefix on lan 11) firewalling and nat - default deny or zero trust? 13) should we check that references to outputs actually correspond with 14) make a flake? 15) see if there are other tests that need adding to CI 15a) is bordervm derivation tested? 18) gl-mt300a 19) gl-mt300n-v2 20) publish the manual using CI 12) write secrets holder as a service with outputs 16) writable filesystem (ubifs?) 17) overlay with squashfs/ubifs - useful? think about workflows for how this thing is installed I could plug tninkpad into the gl-ar750 LAN port to dogfood the wired networking Sat Feb 18 14:26:45 GMT 2023 Apparently we're not currently doing anything special with busybox, just using the default nixos build with the default applets. We'd like to be able to say in modules which applets they need, so that we build all necessary applets but don't waste any space. But we don't want to build a busybox for each module because that would be a big waste of space. One option: - add busybox configuration to `config` so that modules can maul it - add a busybox module that builds it with union of all config and adds link in /bin - make everything else look in /bin instead of referencing pkgs.busybox It would be good if services could assert somehow that their required config is present Sat Feb 18 23:45:13 GMT 2023 # lsmod cd /lib/modules/mac80211 insmod ./compat/compat.ko insmod ./net/wireless/cfg80211.ko insmod ./net/mac80211/mac80211.ko insmod ./drivers/net/wireless/ath/ath.ko insmod ./drivers/net/wireless/ath/ath9k/ath9k_hw.ko insmod ./drivers/net/wireless/ath/ath9k/ath9k_common.ko insmod ./drivers/net/wireless/ath/ath9k/ath9k.ko insmod ./drivers/net/wireless/ath/ath10k/ath10k_core.ko insmod ./drivers/net/wireless/ath/ath10k/ath10k_pci.ko [21.344930] ath9k 18100000.wmac: failed to load calibration data from mtd device [21.352728] ath: phy0: parsing configuration from OF node [21.362576] ath: phy0: serialize_regmode is 0 [21.367092] ath: phy0: UNDEFINED -> AWAKE [21.372051] ath: phy0: Trying EEPROM access at Address 0x03ff [21.377999] ath: phy0: Trying EEPROM access at Address 0x0fff [21.383940] ath: phy0: Trying EEPROM access at Address 0x01ff [21.389879] ath: phy0: Trying OTP access at Address 0x03ff [21.400396] Data bus error, epc == 8027964c, ra == 83125880 [21.406156] Oops[#1]: Sun Feb 19 18:15:27 GMT 2023 We have ath9k listening for packets. To make this ready to use: - need to load the modules - enable bridging lan with wlan - packet forwarding - firewall Mon Feb 20 20:41:17 GMT 2023 need to fix all the other broken ci jobs :-( The wlan test is failing because we moved mac80211 to a module and there's nothing running to insmod it Wed Feb 22 18:17:17 GMT 2023 bridge is e2b3738d0f8c3f2fd76ebcef65612de502a7b121 but it's the wrong way around: the master interface needs to be up whether or not all of its children are, so members depend on master not vice versa Next steps: - re-implement bridge, enable bridging lan with wlan - packet forwarding - firewall - ath10k - ipv6 Fri Feb 24 23:37:56 GMT 2023 bridging wlan was made complex because can't add a device to a bridge until it's operational, and wlan0 is not operational until hostapd has churned awhile. Therefore, "waitup" listens for netlink messages and notifies s6 readiness stuff we have a firewall nft script but we're not running it on boot we have forwarding but no dns, maybe because we haven't told dnsmasq about any upstream servers Sun Feb 26 21:08:47 GMT 2023 to add firmware we need to put files in /lib/firmware, which means a module i guess we should do that in the device module we can create the firmware files as packages for the cal data we would like to get it from the device MTD "art" partition at boot time. f ====from openwrt case "$FIRMWARE" in "ath10k/cal-pci-0000:00:00.0.bin") case $board in allnet,all-wap02860ac|\ araknis,an-500-ap-i-ac|\ araknis,an-700-ap-i-ac|\ engenius,eap1200h|\ engenius,enstationac-v1|\ glinet,gl-x750|\ watchguard,ap300) caldata_extract "art" 0x5000 0x844 ath10k_patch_mac $(macaddr_add $(mtd_get_mac_binary art 0x0) 2) caldata_extract part offset count caldata_dd $mtd /lib/firmware/$FIRMWARE $count $offset || \ caldata_die "failed to extract calibration data from $mtd" dd if=$source of=$target iflag=skip_bytes,fullblock bs=$count skip=$offset count=1 2>/dev/null ======= part=$(basename $(dirname $(grep -l art /sys/class/mtd/*/name))) dd if=/dev/$part \ of=/run/cal-pci-0000:00:00.0.bin iflag=skip_bytes,fullblock \ bs=0x844 skip=0x5000 count=1 Mon Feb 27 22:46:37 GMT 2023 Found and fixed a bunchg of things that were stopping ath10k from working. The remaining problem is (I think) that insmod is not synchronous, so "ip link set up dev wlan1" doesn't work immediately after the module is inserted. Maybe we need another netlink thing to wait until the interface is present. Wed Mar 1 18:26:44 GMT 2023 ath10k works, but the wlan module loading stuff is quite kludgey I wonder if wlan0, wlan1, eth0, eth1 etc should be defined per-device - how does the aplication config know which devices exist? If we decide to switch to some form of persistent device naming, the names will differ from one device to the next. Perhaps the device should also provide standard names where possible? services.network.links = { lan = interface { ... }; wan = interface { ... }; wlan_24 = interface { ... }; wlan_5 = interface { ... }; } Thu Mar 2 22:45:11 GMT 2023 We have a flashable image! Now we can use the gl-ar750 for internet access in the shed, we can apppropriate the other device that's in there and try Liminix on it Fri Mar 3 23:08:58 GMT 2023 If we're going to unplug serial console from the gl-ar750 maybe we should install an ssh server first. 0) set a root password 1) allow setting a root password from configuration.nix (means defining config.users properly) 2) allow authorizedKeys per user 3) dropbear service 4) see if the wired lan works! :-) Sat Mar 4 12:31:07 GMT 2023 To improve logging, each service should have its own s6-log service which prefixes the service name onto the log line and then sends to stdout https://skarnet.org/software/s6/servicedir.html https://skarnet.org/software/s6/s6-log.html As far as I can tell, the `log` directory inside the service directory should itself be a service directory for the s6-log process that does this .... hahaha no that doesn't work s6-rc, for some reason, ignores the `log` directory and requires that loggers be done with consumer-for and producer-for instead Sat Mar 4 23:27:00 GMT 2023 notes for this week's news update * ath10k kernel support and and firmware - 5GHz wifi works - need to retrieve the firmware from a special - partition on the device itself, so we do that using a service that - the wlan interface depends on * replace waitup with more generally useful ifwait to make the ath10k load at boot, we need to insert the module and then wait for it to do something or other in the background before we can configure the interface. so we need something like waitup but for presence not operational state it turns out that a program that just waits for a particular interface state and then exits is quite simple to add into run scripts and we don't need all that notification-fd stuff anyway * move FW_LOADER* config to modules/base * rejig config a bit. - device hardware characteristics are now under the `hardware` key and include the available network interfaces. - options for users and groups are now defined a bit more specifically than "attrset", making it possible to e.g. set a root password - dts is moved from `boot` to `hardware` * now producing flashable images, so you can generate a liminix config and write it to the device instead of having to boot using TFTP and a serial console every time * ssh support * prefix logs with the service name Sun Mar 5 22:51:21 GMT 2023 Added swconfig: it was a straight copy from nixwrt and hasn't changed upstream since. But don't need it, because the lan port works fine without it (I assume both lan ports and the cpu are all connected untagged) Mon Mar 6 09:42:33 GMT 2023 Today I plugged in the mt300a. echo 17 >/sys/class/gpio/export echo out >/sys/class/gpio/gpio17/direction why are our images getting big - lua links ncurses - hostapd links openssl and sqlite - nftables needs - iptables? - jansson? what is that? - libedit/readline - ifwait needs bash File: result/squashfs Size: 10371072 Blocks: 20256 IO Block: 4096 regular file with smaller nftables: 9617408 Blocks: 18784 hostapd wqithout sqlite 9003008 Blocks: 17584 without bash: 8622080 Blocks: 16840 IO Block: 4096 regular file without lua readline: bigger?! 8769536 Blocks: 17128 IO Block: 4096 regular file Mon Mar 6 20:57:49 GMT 2023 [ 0.539992] mtk_soc_eth 10100000.ethernet: mdio-bus disabled [ 10.493918] platform regulatory.0: Direct firmware load for regulatory.db fail ed with error -2 [ 10.502828] cfg80211: failed to load regulatory.db Check in morning, but whichever port the ethernet cable is plugged into, is considered by the kernel as port 0 - which I think we should treat as WAN VLAN 1: vid: 1 ports: 1 2 3 4 5 6t VLAN 2: vid: 2 ports: 0 6t ip link add link eth0 name lan type vlan id 1 ip link add link eth0 name wan type vlan id 2 figure out how to add these to gl-mt300a device config then extedner.nix can add a bridge Tue Mar 7 20:13:15 GMT 2023 We need NTP or some other way to get accurate time [done] Need to add regulatory.db somewhere standard, maybe modules/wlan? Tue Mar 7 21:43:56 GMT 2023 When we get to phase 2, need to review how network interfaces and their addresses interplay. It should be possible to have a network interface and interrogate the addresses associated with it - esp with ipv6 where there are multiple addresses for the device This thought prompted by looking at the loopback interface, which is a bundle of addresses and therefore we can't see what any of them are Tue Mar 7 22:05:44 GMT 2023 [phase 1] 20) publish the manual using CI 30) document flashing process 31) go through all the unexpected dmesg and triage it 25) ntp or some other accurate time source [phase 1.5] 26) ssh keys 8) get ipv6 address from pppoe 9) get ipv6 delegation from pppoe and add prefix to lan 10) support dhcp6 in dnsmasq, and advertise prefix on lan 11) firewalling and nat - default deny or zero trust? 7) upgrade ppp to something with an ipv6-up-script option, move ppp and pppoe derivations into their own files 32) set up iperf and do some performance measurement 35) also we need to check our wireless country code [phase 2] 3) document services so I can remember how they work. Refer back to Oct 18 for notes that no longer make sense 4) check out restart behaviour of dependent services when depended-on service dies 13) check that references to outputs correspond with declared outputs 33) network interfaces vs the services that manage their addresses 34) write a short guide explaining how to use s6-svc [phase n] 12) write secrets holder as a service with outputs 16) writable filesystem (ubifs?) 17) overlay with squashfs/ubifs - useful? think about workflows for how this thing is installed dmesg lines to investigate for gl-mt300a: [ 0.467314] OF: Bad cell count for /palmbus@10000000/spi@b00/flash@0/partition [ 0.539709] mtk_soc_eth 10100000.ethernet: mdio-bus disabled ? [ 8.778513] compat: loading out-of-tree module taints kernel. [ 17.686561] ieee80211 phy0: rt2800_wait_bbp_rf_ready: Error - BBP/RF register access failed, aborting [ 17.696025] ieee80211 phy0: rt2800_loft_iq_calibration: Warning - RF RX busy in LOFT IQ calibration [ 17.875147] ieee80211 phy0: rt2800_rxiq_calibration: Warning - Timeout waiting for MAC status in RXIQ calibration for gl-ar750: [ 0.000000] Unknown kernel command line parameters "earlyprintk=serial,ttyS0", will be passed to user space. [ 0.416679] OF: Bad cell count for /ahb/spi@1f000000/flash@0/partitions [ 0.825495] ag71xx 19000000.eth: Could not connect to PHY device. Deferring probe. [ 1.632700] pci_bus 0000:00: root bus resource [mem 0x10000000-0x13ffffff] [ 1.639824] pci_bus 0000:00: root bus resource [io 0x0000] [ 1.645601] pci_bus 0000:00: No busn resource found for root bus, will use [bus 00-ff] [ 32.032326] ath10k_pci 0000:00:00.0: pdev param 0 not supported by firmware [ 36.627844] ath10k_pci 0000:00:00.0: failed to receive initialized event from target: 00000000 Fri Mar 10 13:17:56 GMT 2023 Lunchtime notes on images for real devices, vs ci.nix * successfully building an image doesn't mean that the image boots or does anything useful * don't want to faff with serial wires on every device every time to test it. so * ideally, build ram-based images of rotuer, extneder, arhcive in CI with a watchdog timer that will reboot if it can't see the network * figure out how to boot into the new image from an ssh connection. I assume the challenging bit here is grabbing x MB of contiguous phys mem after boot: I think we'd have to reserve it at _first_ boot and then somehow copy into it before rebooting An easier first goal might be a tool to flash from the shell command line, but that runs a greater risk of bricking Fri Mar 10 14:35:40 GMT 2023 programs.busybox = { enable = true; applets = [... ]; config = { }; } Fri Mar 10 23:49:04 GMT 2023 Well, we have the backup host config up and running - though haven't plugged it back into its disk yet. For task 1 what remains is 1) ntp sync 2) write up the flashing procedure 3) a video? Sat Mar 11 13:58:20 GMT 2023 ================== for video what is liminix - nix-based system for creating OS images for routers - not "nixos on your router" - nixos-like module system, - musl for libc - s6/s6-rc for services - entirely cross-compiled why am i making a video? - unless you have a suitable spare device to install on, and you want to take it apart, it's currently hard to take liminix for a spin - I have these things, so I can give you a tour let's have a look at how the hardware's hooked up web site & manual a config file: - observe the comments: - not going to spend ages on this because it's not in its final form. - as we get more configs for more use cases, we will get a better feel for what can be abstracted - that will come later: work so far has been on the hardware support side to show that it builds, we're going to add a package. otherwise, everything from this build is probably already cached build the config tftpboot on hardware flash on hardware show ci show a qemu target Mon Mar 13 22:46:46 GMT 2023 1) rsync on arhcive is failing because no nogroup group "/nix/store/gfzzl157r8xyp38lpcfxydkiiy6zrs3c-rsync-3.2.6/bin/rsync" "--verbose" "--stats" "--password-file" "/etc/nixos/secrets/arhcive-rsync" "-rltgoDz" "/var/spool/backup" "backup@arhcive.lan::srv/" @ERROR: invalid gid nogroup rsync error: error starting client-server protocol (code 5) at main.c(1837) [sender=3.2.6] 2) we can run findfs in a loop until the disk appears 3) still haven't decided how to do ntp but maybe we should just use the busybox one 4) some way to do upgrades over the wire - boot with reserved mem and a phram device at 110-128MB even in the flashable version - watchdog timer in kernel - kexec in kernel - userland service to feed the dog as long as local network is up (may need to start it a couple of minutes after boot, how do we do that?) - can we use flashcp on a phram mtd? 5) maybe setup a vhost for hydra or something [nix-shell:~/t]$ wget --reject-regex '\?' -D localhost -N -r --exclude-directories=/api --level=2 --convert-links -e robots=off http://localhost:3003/jobset/liminix/build/ is almost a mirror Tue Mar 14 20:17:35 GMT 2023 - do we have a phram mtd? need config for size and location - how do we set the boot device - for first boot need to boot real flash, use dtb, ignore bootloader args - for kexec, boot phram, specify args somehow (could rewrite dtb) => can use same kernel for both if we can give kexec a dtb with different params, which seems to be possible so we need a module for the initial kernel to say - create phram mtd - boot from real mtd (will be index + 1) - enable KEXEC in kernel - add kexec-tools and for the kernel we boot into - most of the above - except for the boot device - create an output with objects that kexec(8) can parse Could be same module for both with different outputs what do we call this thing? "revertable" Wed Mar 15 19:11:09 GMT 2023 "revertable" implies mtd support for the rootfs and a ramdisk at defined location "tftpboot" implies "revertable", because it will use the same ramdisk Fri Mar 17 11:44:40 GMT 2023 - patch the kernel kexec code to pass DTB to new kernel unconditionally - unpatch pernel to pass command line to kexec (breaks DTB passing) - decide how we specify rootfs. doing it by number is awkward - may be phram - may be real mtd root - may be real mtd root but renumbered becuase phram exists Wild idea: we could probably get rid of the need for declaring a phram device in the first kernel, if we can use kexec to copy the squashfs into physical ram. As far as I can see this is a simple(sic) matter of specifying it as a segment, but we would have to extend kexec-tools to do this and it's quite a niche option if we make it do all the mtd setup. kexec --dtb=foo.dtb --map-file=squashfs@0x120000 Sat Mar 18 18:02:26 GMT 2023 What if: we added derivations for "apply openwrt changes" as packages, which could then be called from the kernel derivation's extraPatchPhase? There could be one for generic and one for each openwrt targetop Mon Mar 20 18:40:53 GMT 2023 - kexec patch is sent to mailing list, keep an eye for replies - watchdog - ntp - rebuild images for live devices - can we build a static busybox with flashcp applet and scp it to arhcive etc? - [DONE] install mailman and hyperkitty on myhtic, create mailing list Tue Mar 21 22:59:54 GMT 2023 I haven't found a way to arm the watchdog before userland runs, which would be really nice: although there's WATCHDOG_HANDLE_BOOT_ENABLED and WATCHDOG_OPEN_TIMEOUT it doesn't seem to be sufficient, Maybe those options work only when the hardware watchdog is already armed. It might not be completely awful insofar as any failure to mount root usually results in panic anyway, so provided we start watching early in boot then there's not a big window for anything to go wrong What should the watchdog service do? Ideally we want something that "ratchets" : can be started in early boot and signals health as long as the system is starting up, then once the system is in "steady state" it stops pinging as soon as any part of that steady state becomes unhealthy. This feels like a refinement for a much later phase though. Maybe the health criteria might be (sshd and lan services are running) or (time since boot < 120s) Thu Mar 23 00:11:23 GMT 2023 tftpboot and (kexecboot || flashable) have incompatible DTB-finding strategies which is painful if you add both modules and then expect tftp booting to still work Maybe we could patch the kernel to use some better strategy for when to use/ignore the bootloader command line: e.g "only if it contains the string 'liminix'". Could do this by patching arch/mips/kernel/setup.c bootcmdline_init to if(strstr(arcs_cmdline, "liminix") == NULL) arcs_cmdline[0] = '\0' and then defining CONFIG_MIPS_CMDLINE_DTB_EXTEND. The bootloader command line then needs to specify only the _additional_ parameters that weren't in the DTB (later: that turned out to be quite straighforward) Fri Mar 24 23:45:12 GMT 2023 - add ntp support - [DONE] expose hydra to internet - check MAC address weirdness? - call Task 1 "done" Sun Mar 26 00:19:15 GMT 2023 Would be nice to have a flash.sh built in outputs.flashable Sun Mar 26 15:27:14 BST 2023 Let's think about services and modules. Module + can change global config * add users, groups etc * change kernel config * change busybox config + well-typed parameters - is a "singleton": can't have the same module included twice with different config. e.g. can't have two hostap modules running on different wlan radios. - can't express dependencies: a depends on b suppose: * modules add service functions to the config? then there's no way to define a service while forgetting to import the module * we use the lib.types stuff for service function arguments * maybe we stop naming services.foo for every damn thing * but remember, s6 services do need unique names imports = [ ../modules/dhcp4 ]; services.dhcp4 = config.services.udhcp { interface = lan.device; options = { foo = true; bar = 42; }; depends = [ services.some_other_thing ]; } modules/dhcp4 udhcp fn needs to define a type for its argument, then use something like if arg_type.check def.value then res else throw "The option value `${showOption loc}' in `${def.file}' is not a ${arg_type.name}.") (where def comes from I don't know yet) Tue Mar 28 10:44:40 BST 2023 we should reserve the name "service" for actual instantiated services. This means we need a name for the functions that make services. "class", "template", "fn", "maker", "factory"? And a namespace name so they're not interleaved with real services, which sort of suggests they are packages if we want to do services = { foo = longrun { ... }; bar = longrun { ... }; } without repeating the `name` as an attribute of the longrun, then longrun can't return a derivation: it has to return some function that accepts `name` as a parameter. where services.a depends on services.b, at the time its builder is run it needs to know what name s6-rc will use for service b maybe an s6 service definition should be an attrset not a derivation. maybe this is outside scope for phase 2 Tue Mar 28 13:22:06 BST 2023 Reading nixos/doc/manual/development/building-parts.chapter.md it suggests to me that we should rename config.outputs to config.system.outputs. The more general question here is whether it's good to be augmenting a variable called "config" with all this generated stuff that is patently not configuration - perhaps putting it under a "system" key will keep it all in one place Tue Mar 28 13:32:30 BST 2023 how should we handle filesystem state? e.g. resolvconf service if a service provides a file at a known global pathname, it can't be parametrised - it must be a singleton. Tue Mar 28 20:25:20 BST 2023 wondering if we should swap phases 2 and 3. We can't really address modules without addressing services, which is phase +n, whereas we can tackle overlay/ubi whenever nand flash may have bad blocks nor flash (supposedly) doesn't ubi provides erase counts and bad block remapping on top of the mtd interface. this means we should avoid flashcp of a ubi image straight onto (nand) mtd as we will lose the erase counts and bad block information that UBI tracks. overlayfs works on a filename basis, so might not be very effective : any change that results in a new store path will mean the entire package appears in two places. I think it's reasonable to offer squashfs or ubifs without overlay. open questions: 1) if uboot doesn't support UBI, we can't boot a kernel on a ubifs so we need reserved space for the kernel. - unless we add some padding after the kernel, every new kernel that's bigger than its predecessor will trash the start of the ubi space (and wipe out its erase count) - This suggests we should build more stuff as modules and less as compiled-in 2) once a device has had a ubi volume created on it, probably we want to use ubi-aware tools to update that volume in future instead of a whole new flash, because we wish to preserve erase counts. This means running ubiformat --image-file=foo.ubi on the device instead of flashcp we can add a "ubi-flashable" output that creates a .ubi image and a flashcp image that wraps it, with instructions on which to use. Fri Mar 31 22:13:54 BST 2023 Error: too small LEB size 3968, minimum is 15360 > This error means that you are trying to mount too small UBI volume. Probably because your flash is too small? Try to use JFFS2, then, because it suits small flashes better since it has much lower space overhead. Indeed, UBIFS stores much more indexing information on the flash media than JFFS2, so it has much higher overhead. Also, UBI has some overhead (see here). Thus, if you have a small flash device (e.g., about 64MiB), it makes sense to consider using JFFS2. Argh. Oh well, Sat Apr 1 15:27:39 BST 2023 There's limited value in recreating pseudofiles for jffs2 because the system is writable - changes made to /bin, /dev etc in config.filesystem should take effect on a running system. Can we take inspiration from https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-darlings/ ? in early boot: mount ramfs on / mount the writeable filesystem on /persist/ bind mount /persist/nix on /nix run script to populate rootfs from pseudofiles on a router, do we need _anything_ persistent that's outside the store? - state for dhcp leases and stuff - secrets - maybe, files that the user has downloaded this will probably require initramfs. if just use jffs2 as the rootfs and don't worry about /persist, we can skip that step. [ aside: I think we may be putting two busyboxes in the image: see modules/s6/default.nix s6-init-scripts has buildInputs = [busybox]; ] Mon Apr 3 18:34:26 BST 2023 suppose - we boot the system with systemConfig=/nix/store/eeeeee-system - the early-init script runs /target/$systemConfig/create-root /target after mounting /target - then it runs chroot /target $systemConfig/bin/init "$@" or maybe we could combine those steps? or maybe it doesn't matter too much ... Thu Apr 6 21:25:41 BST 2023 what now? - put a jffs2 onto some hardware device - what do we do with uboot? - should we pad the kernel? - maybe kernel module support would be good if we're making it hard to do kernel updates - try the nix-copy-closure thing and work out what else we don't know - [done] detect endian correctly to ask a different question, what else do we need to dogfood a router? Sun Apr 9 10:06:08 BST 2023 - rename outputs.flashable to outputs.flashimage - rename modules/flashable to modules/flashable_ro - create outputs.flashable in modules/jffs2 - rename modules/jffs2 to modules/flashable_rw - add enable config to both? - enable kernel module compilation Mon Apr 10 23:50:41 BST 2023 - initramfs parses /proc/cmdline to find root fs, might not play nice with defaulting - how to build kernel modules - look at closure size, is it this big because we've broken it or is jffs2 usually this much bigger than squashfs - maybe squashfs with overlay might be better if we could ensure hardlinks? - maybe there's something like overlayfs but content-addressable? Sat Apr 15 18:57:46 BST 2023 for the same configuration: -r--r--r-- 1 root root 6066176 Jan 1 1970 /nix/store/0x271rg45mcjjgbma9wi31h1yd109fpy-frob-squashfs -r--r--r-- 1 root root 12255232 Jan 1 1970 /nix/store/zx11adagcbzqsnqkyz5kgvr392vhlrpr-make-jffs2 may want to reconsider not using squashfs with overlay Wed Apr 19 22:22:48 BST 2023 Where next? Sun Apr 23 18:24:34 BST 2023 - we are down to ~ 11MB image for a barely functional (IPV4) router this is by avoiding all dependencies on openssl or gnutls - rotuer is not recognising when I set the hostname - I may have forgotten the root password :-( - why is hello world 70K unless hardeningDisable? Fri Apr 28 20:51:52 BST 2023 To do nix-copy-closure we need nix-store, which is a symlink to nix, which is -rwxr-xr-x 1 dan users 2.3M Apr 28 21:08 nix (stripped). This is a lot bigger than, say, a simple script to loop through the closure of a derivation and copy only the store folders that don't exist already. * we'd like to only transmit the packages that aren't already present * we'd like to use a single ssh connection S: here is a list of package names C: these are the names of the packages I want S: here are the packages while read $f ; do test -d $f || echo $f end Tue May 2 21:53:08 BST 2023 1) we have a script that runs on the receiver, which - accepts a list of store paths - prints the missing store paths - runs cpio -i < stdio 2) we need a script for the sender that - refs=$(nix-store -q --references $1 && echo end) - opens ssh connection - print ssh $refs - needed= capture result until "end" received - find needed | cpio -o > ssh-connection - close connection 3) to have a reasonable hope of testing this we should do it with qemu. It would be nice if we could connect without faff to the qemu lan interface : either we do this by bringing up another qemu vm (preferably with the host store shared, otherwise it has to build a mips cross compiler/libc) or maybe we could do something unholy with ssh ProxyCommand ssh -o ProxyCommand "socat - UDP4-DATAGRAM:230.0.0.1:1234,sourceport=1234,reuseaddr,ip-add-membership=230.0.0.1:127.0.0.1" 4) we haven't solved garbage collection, though I think "remove everything not in nix-path-registration" might be what's needed there Wed May 3 22:01:19 BST 2023 Something weird is going on with qemu net device enumeration: when I run it interactively I'm getting the access network (mac ending :02) on eth0 and the lan (mac ending :01) on eth1, and if it's behaving the same in CI then how come any of the tests work? vanilla-confinguration.nix definitely assumes lan=eth0 By switching from -device virtio-net-pci to -device virtio-net then I get the desired behaviour back Sat May 6 18:42:28 BST 2023 Next: - package min-copy-closure - see if we can use it on some output to copy the whole system closure - post-copying symlink munging - try it on a real device, see if it works for config file updates - collect-garbage/delete-old-generation Sun May 7 23:03:03 BST 2023 Shortly after all the work to reduce system closure size last time, I tried adding the necessary packages to support nix-copy-closure and saw it start building a complete C++ system with Boost. My fears that this would lead to quite a large increase in the system size were, it turned out, entirely founded. So I wrote my own - or at least, a quite minimal substitute. The core logic is simple - on the sender, we get the list of required packages, then we check for the existence of `/nix/store/eeeeeee-foo` for each of them on the target, and whatever's missing we send across the link using cpio. It sounds simple, and it should be simple, and in retrospect it _was_ simple. Along the way I went on a bit of a Qemu networking tangent and learned quite a lot about the bash `coproc` command Tue May 9 21:06:53 BST 2023 General direction of my thoughts: - get a baseline working rotuer system - prove that min-copy-closure works with it - refactor the crap out of it - configurablise the bordervm usb ethernet setup - when we have a good idea of how/whether min-copy-closure *actually* works, declare "writeable filesystem" to be done - start to get more of a feel for how the services/config hang together ? why does rotuer not have a hostname? ? how can we get a device hooked up to rotuer's lan port that we can control remotely Sun May 14 23:25:46 BST 2023 the outputs.systemConfiguration attribute builds a derivation containing a single file bin/activate _Presumably_, copying its closure will copy all the things, as we already use it as the roots for jffs2 creation. However, there is also a symlink created from /init at jffs2 creation Mon May 15 21:32:38 BST 2023 Had a neat idea about uing an overlayfs combining jffs2 and ramfs to do upgrades that would otherwise be larger than the flash. Could use "overlay merge" from https://github.com/kmxz/overlayfs-tools Wed May 17 15:18:55 BST 2023 liminix-rebuild doesn't collect garbage (this is a mising feature, not a bug). We think we can fix this using nix-path-registration: specifically, by deleting anything not in it. What we're going to do: build a fresh system image for rotuer, then dogfood liminix-rebuild until we've succeeded in getting it to change its hostname Also wondering if we should drop outputs.default, but maybe not * systemConfiguration: used for updates * vmroot: used for qemu * flashimage: used for flashing * tftproot: used for dev/test As long as we're consistently setting the default output to whichever is the appropriate "full production image" I think we're good. Wed May 17 22:45:40 BST 2023 Random thought: when we bind mount /target/persist/nix to /target/nix we could make it read-only. worth doing? Thu May 18 10:59:39 BST 2023 - liminix-rebuild can't find reboot: probably the PATH is just generally wrong for ssh sessions (maybe all non-login sessions?) - need to copy path registration file somewhere useful and delete stuff not in it at the appropriate time. Would be safest to do that either late in the shutdown process before rebooting, or during boot. Fri May 19 15:18:13 BST 2023 If we make min-collect-garbage - just a command you can run whenever - that will be fine for current capabilities. It won't work with the theoretical overlayfs system, though: we need to copy-down from the ramfs to real flash before rebooting, and that can't happen until there's disk space to do it Sat May 20 22:35:25 BST 2023 We have a working min-collect-garbage (seems to, anyway ...) - having ssh host key wiped on reboot is sucky. maybe we can have /persist/secrets and a service that looks there? - find out what files ash sources on non-login shell startup [ set ENV=/etc/ashrc in parent process env ] - services.default is suboptimal as there is no way to add to it without wiping it - decide whether to use liminix- or min- as our prefix for nixy commands - should we move config.outputs -> config.system.outputs ? see Mar 28 - less crap firewall - add ipv6 support to rotuer - create an l2tp configuration - iperf and tuning - wlan country code dropbear weak hashes? https://github.com/mkj/dropbear/issues/138 Sun May 21 11:48:07 BST 2023 dropbear will generate host keys on first connection. It's (probably) good that the key is generated on-device and also that we wait until there's some randomness. It's not so good that it will only write the key to DSS_PRIV_FILENAME which is hardcoded to /run Sun May 21 17:27:31 BST 2023 What do we need for ipv6? - upgrade ppp to something with an ipv6-up-script option, move ppp and pppoe derivations into their own files - get ipv6 address from pppoe - get ipv6 delegation from DHCPv6 - support dhcp6 in dnsmasq, and advertise prefix on lan - firewall settings Sun May 21 21:30:17 BST 2023 Making hydra build the docs is straightforward, but making it _publish_ the docs is outside scope, really. It can serve the files but they're all text/plain Should hydra push the docs to www.liminix.org or should www.liminix.org pull? TODO-at-some-point: assign uids and gids dynamically, somehow Tue May 23 22:56:33 BST 2023 following the guidance at https://support.aa.net.uk/IPv6: we run odhcp6c to do router solicitation/advertisement dance odhcp6c environment variables: RA_ADDRESSES= RA_REACHABLE=0 CER= PASSTHRU=00170020200108b0000000000000000000002020200108b0000000000000000000002021 SERVER=fe80::203:97ff:fed6:0 RA_MTU=0 RA_ROUTES=::/0,fe80::203:97ff:fed6:0,65535,512 OPTION_1=00030001e4956e4ef2fa NTP_FQDN= OPTION_2=00030001000397d60000 RA_DOMAINS= DOMAINS= AFTR= SIP_IP= NTP_IP= PREFIXES=2001:8b0:de3a:40dc::/64,7198,7198 RA_HOPLIMIT=64 RA_DNS= RDNSS=2001:8b0::2020 2001:8b0::2021 SNTP_IP= RA_RETRANSMIT=0 SIP_DOMAIN= ADDRESSES=2001:8b0:1111:1111:0:ffff:51bb:4cf2/128,3598,7198 # ip -6 route |grep default default via fe80::203:97ff:fed6:0 dev ppp0 metric 1024 expires 65211sec presumably from RA_ROUTES but why is the metric appaently doubled? Tue May 30 21:25:37 BST 2023 We have an odhcpc script that preserves the prefix delegation from the ISP. We need a service that notices whenever the state is available/has changed, and updates the LAN IPv6 address. The service can depend on odhcp add inotify to packages use writeFennelScript with that dep see if it works Wed May 31 23:33:00 BST 2023 We have a thing that sets ipv6 address on lan interface, yay us A firewall would be a very good idea Thu Jun 1 18:46:59 BST 2023 TODO for now: - services.default is suboptimal as there is no way to add to it without wiping it - decide whether to use liminix- or min- as our prefix for nixy commands - should we move config.outputs -> config.system.outputs ? see Mar 28 - less crap firewall - create an l2tp configuration - iperf and tuning - wlan country code Thu Jun 1 21:26:37 BST 2023 how can a client machine "opt out" of using the firewall, to allow incoming connections? Most convenient would be to have a separate SSID for grownups. Assuming it shows up as a separate wlan device, we can write firewall rules to allow incoming connections on that interface (can we? only if the packet is identifiable as destined for that interface) https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6092.html https://emailstuff.org/rfc/rfc7084 We could block incoming for slaac and dhcp addresses and permit it for stable private addresses. If we were fairly sure that devices won't ask for stable private addresses just for funsies. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/IPv6_#Stable_private_addresses Fri Jun 2 14:42:43 BST 2023 I found a handy guide to nftables at https://ww.telent.net/2023/6/2/turning_the_nftables Mon Jun 5 16:56:44 BST 2023 How are we going to do this firewall thing then? I can see no reason to have more than one table per family, so lets just name the tables after families There is nothing in nftables for functionally grouping rules by requirement that may touch multiple hooks/chains, so we need our own abstraction - and we can't call it any name that nftables uses already (so, not "ruleset"). rulegroup? "policy" would be a good name except that it's already taken "concern"? "requirement"? "feature"? Mon Jun 19 20:45:48 BST 2023 why is chrony using libedit? Thu Jun 22 09:52:57 BST 2023 - There is a lot more lua being installed (luac, docs, static libraries etc) than we really need. - update User docs to include a list of supported targets Thu Jun 22 23:43:06 BST 2023 - is there a sysfs to enable ipv6 forwarding? - we haven't an ipv4 firewall yet PATH=`echo /nix/store/*nftables*/bin`:$PATH nft list ruleset Thu Jun 22 23:58:58 BST 2023 Looks like we're missing at least one kernel config setting for nftables. Would this be a good time to do a derivation for building kernel modules? Sun Jul 9 21:21:17 BST 2023 Tue Jul 11 22:10:17 BST 2023 - s6 cheatsheet, find or write - could we have > 1 module add to services.default? - odhcp should parse values from environ and write more files, to save readers from parsing it - pkgs.liminix, who knows what thats for any more? - interface.device, as a general rule, doesn't work because the device name may be known only at runtime (e.g. for ppp) - iperf - figure out wifi regdomain Tue Jul 11 23:01:59 BST 2023 We can make services depend on kernel modules, however not on bakedin kernel config [from March: "Let's think about services and modules."] Module + can change global config * add users, groups etc * change kernel config * change busybox config + well-typed parameters - is a "singleton": can't have the same module included twice with different config. e.g. can't have two hostap modules running on different wlan radios. - can't express dependencies: a depends on b thought I had then was: modules provide services. requiring the ppp module causes config.services.ppp to exist, so you can services.default = [ (config.services.ppp { tty = "17"; baud = "57600"; secrets = blah; }) ... ] this might work. also though we should find out how to do type checking on service params Wed Jul 12 23:23:02 BST 2023 https://github.com/NixOS/mobile-nixos/pull/406 // why mobile nixos uses mobile.outputs instead of system.build suggests that system.build may not be a thing to blindly emulate if a service is a derivation should we expect to want to be able to call it with .override? maybe we want to override the package containing the daemon it runs. How do we best pass service config as well? Maybe a service template is a function that returns a derivation imports = [ ./modules/pqmud.nix ]; services.mud = system.services.pqmud { realm = "A deep cavern"; port = 4067; users = import ./allowed-users.nix; # etc etc }; services.mudBeta = let mud = system.services.pqmud { realm = "A very deep cavern"; port = 4068; users = import ./allowed-users.nix; }; in mud.overrideAttrs { pqmud = pkgs.pkmudLatest; }; so we have config.system.services # services provided by modules config.system.outputs # build artefacts of various types the services provided by a module must be introspectable in some way so that we can compile a list of service options per module service parameters are defined using the module type system. Something like this? # mud.nix system.services.pqmud = args : let t = { name = mkOption { type = types.str; }; realm = mkOption { type = types.str; }; port = mkOption { type = types.port; default = 12345; }; users = mkOption { type = types.any; }; }; in assert isType (submodule { options = t; }) args; longrun { inherit (args) name; run = "${pkgs.pqmud}/bin/pqmud --port ${port} ....." }; Fri Jul 14 19:07:59 BST 2023 It works for pppoe, though typechecking error messages could be better. - We need to find a good place to keep the typeCheck function so that everyone can use it. - also the type_service type defn exists only locally in modules.nix, and we would like to refer to it elsewhere Thu Aug 10 21:46:36 BST 2023 to finish service/modules milestone [done] there are some modules not using serviceDefn - modules included by standard.nix should have all their options grouped together in docs how can we determine which they are? or maybe "modules that don't contain services" is an acceptable criterion maybe this is not actually an issue, if the modules are reasonably coherent. It looks odd now because base.nix is a mess [done] print the module pathname so people know what to import [done] docs don't print the examples [check?] and seem to be getting the default wrong too - decide what we deem to be "internal" (if anything) is `filesystem` internal, for example? or `busybox`? they're both mostly _used_ internally but may still be valuable to expose [done] maybe document outputs separately or not at all? [done] bridge to be one service instead of two? [done] get rid of services/ - anything else in rotuer.nix that we should servicify - services for liminix.networking - a nice way to specify service dependencies [done] - do another video Mon Aug 21 20:02:55 BST 2023 a nice way to do dependencies would be somethng like services.thething = let s = svc.thing { .... }; in addDependencies s (with config.services; [otherthing yetanother]); except that addDependencies is a really klunky name. dependsOn is very slightly better? or maybe it could be a function of the derivation? services.thething = svc.thing { .... }.depends (with config.services; [otherthing yetanother]); --- what does it mean to be dependent on an interface? that's it up? running? has an address? has a collection of addresses? services.defaultroute4 = route { name = "defaultroute4"; via = "$(output ${services.wan} address)"; target = "default"; dependencies = [ services.wan ]; }; - this route requires the interface to have an address (if wan is an interface, anyway ...) - but otoh a dhcp client doesn't want to wait for an address, because it is assigning the address. should an address provider have "interface name" as an output? is there a set of outputs that every address provider should have - whether static, dhcp, pppoe? maybe we're in decision paralysis and should just move forward with what we know Wed Aug 23 18:56:08 BST 2023 We may want to change the hardware device files to specify network interface names not services. Otherwise hardware devices (boards) depend on module-based-services, which is a bit weird. Thu Aug 24 18:54:03 BST 2023 - we want network and bridge to be separate modules, because bridge introduces extra kernel config - bridge/service wants to create a network device ("ip link"), using quite similar code as network/link.nix - but bridge/service is a derivation: it has sight of pkgs but not config offtopic: useful s6-rc commands at https://www.skarnet.org/software/s6-rc/faq.html Fri Aug 25 23:37:57 BST 2023 where we left off: bridge is a bundle, and bundles can't have outputs, so how do we set the ifname of the bridge? - ifname of the primary is set - actually, most things that depend on the bridge really just depend on the primary anyway (it's OK if 1 <= n < #members are down) - but *something* should depeond on all the members turns out maybe we needed two services after all? Sun Aug 27 23:50:18 BST 2023 I've done enough to make rotuer build, but in the process trashed vanilla-configuration as I entirely forgot we don't have a dhcpv4 client service. Need to fix that ... - anything else in rotuer.nix that we should servicify - anything in vanilla-configuration ditto - and arhcive (rsync, watchdog) - services for liminix.networking - tidy up the dependency handling in serviceDefn build (interface is fine, implementation is a bit brutal) - write a blog entry Mon Aug 28 16:58:49 BST 2023 - [done] ntp is not setting the time - nftables syntax error Thu Aug 31 23:53:54 BST 2023 - anything else in rotuer.nix that we should servicify [done] - packet forwarding - dhcp6 client - what to do with acquire-{wan,lan} scripts? - resolvconf - [done] anything in vanilla-configuration ditto - packet forwarding - and arhcive - [not doing] rsync - [done] watchdog - [done] mount - nftables syntax error - tidy up the dependency handling in serviceDefn build (interface is fine, implementation is a bit brutal) - [done] services for liminix.networking - [done] write a blog entry - [done] ntp is not setting the time - [done] static dhcp(6) lease support reqd for dogfooding Sat Sep 2 21:35:41 BST 2023 Considerations for "mount" service: each filesystem needs to depend on any mount points for its parent directories, and maybe also on other services (e.g. filesystem modules, network devices, routes) mountpoints = { mnt = { media = svc.mountpoint.build { fstype = "msdos"; device = "/dev/sda1"; options = [ ...]; }; archive = svc.mountpoint.build { fstype = "ext4"; device = "/dev/sda2"; options = [ ...]; mountpoints = { remote = svc.mountpoint.build { fstype = "nfs"; device = "doc.ic.ac.uk:/public"; }; }; }; }; } services.somethingelse = svc.ftpd.build { # ... dependencies = [ mountpoints.mnt.archive ]; } what don't we like about this? we have to walk the nested attrset in a weird way, because the services may contain other mountpoints. Maybe just keep it simple and do services.mountpoints = bundle { name = "mountpoints"; contents = [ svc.mountpoint.build { device = "/dev/sda2"; fstype = "ext4"; directory = "/mnt/isos"; }; svc.mountpoint.build { device = "/dev/sdb1"; fstype = "msdos"; directory = "/mnt/backup"; dependencies = [ load-vfat-module ]; }; ]; } Sun Sep 3 17:34:36 BST 2023 how to dogfood DHCP6 server: static lease support DHCP client and acquire-{lan-prefix,wan-address} The emergency boot thingy in glinet u-boot won't help because it expects to flash from its tftp request instead of booting it. So we could use kexec instead except that the openwrt install doesn't have it. So we could swap the hardware devices, the only downside of that being that then I don't have a test system any more. Or we could YOLO it. Sun Sep 3 22:11:02 BST 2023 I think we should rejigger the documentation ... - "getting started": worked example, building and installing Liminix with a very simple config (wifi AP with ssh daemon) - using modules - link to module reference - creating custom services - longrun or oneshot - dependencies - outputs - creating your own modules - hacking on Liminix itself - contributing - external links and resources - module reference - hardware device reference --- I think we might rename wlan_24 to wlan and wlan_5 to wlan1. This is on the assumption that almost no device is 5GHz only, so would make it easier to write a basic wlan example that works both on 2.4GHz boards and dual radio boards Mon Sep 4 23:15:26 BST 2023 If dhcpcd parsed the update-script output into separate files, half the complexity of acquire-lan-prefix would go away. The other half is because it subscribes to changes in the outputs instead of just running once. Perhaps there's a better way to do that? Could separate prefixes and addresses something like this... outputs/prefix/2001\:8b0\:de3a\:40dc\:\:/prefix outputs/prefix/2001\:8b0\:de3a\:40dc\:\:/length outputs/prefix/2001\:8b0\:de3a\:40dc\:\:/preferred outputs/prefix/2001\:8b0\:de3a\:40dc\:\:/valid outputs/prefix/2001\:8b0\:de3a\:80\:\:/prefix outputs/prefix/2001\:8b0\:de3a\:80\:\:/length outputs/prefix/2001\:8b0\:de3a\:80\:\:/preferred outputs/prefix/2001\:8b0\:de3a\:80\:\:/valid the directory name is arbitrary as long as it's unique. Might even be better to remove the colons outputs/prefix/200108b0de3a40dc/valid or we could adopt the MS convention and replace with hyphens outputs/prefix/2001-8b0-de3a-40dc--/prefix Also: we should write some kind of test for this... Tue Sep 5 21:36:39 BST 2023 How do we set the cpu governor? Fri Sep 8 21:26:36 BST 2023 We want a fennel thing that reads a filesystem tree into a nested table. And a thing to diff two tables Sat Sep 9 22:40:50 BST 2023 Subscribers to odhcp6c outputs need to be able to tell which addresses are new and which have been removed since the last run, which now we have ohdcp-script producing parsed data means they need to compare tables by value. Which is a faff. What if the directory name were a hash of all the relevant fields such that clients could just say "new directory, must be new address" We can have literal prefix, then need to encode length,preferred,valid,extra space-efficiently. I cannot currently see any way to use whatever hashing Lua uses for its table lookups, which is a bit disapppointing, so we might have to make our own https://gist.github.com/scheler/26a942d34fb5576a68c111b05ac3fabe this is DJBHash, though doesn't appear to deal with integer overflow function hash(str) h = 5381; for c in str:gmatch"." do h = ((h << 5) + h) + string.byte(c) end return h end Mon Sep 11 20:31:25 BST 2023 acquire-lan/wan-foo have no tests, and the test setup is a bit of a faff as they are both waiting on the filesystem also, testing lua scripts is a faff without splitting them into script/module am wondering if we could do some kind of convention that we only write modules not scripts but something in the fennel->lua can call the module's `run` method. Tuesday Here is a working shebang for write-fennel: #!/nix/store/5iwv3h2jjbk2vib2bpwx3g9knpb02x3y-lua-5.3.6/bin/lua -e dofile(arg[0]).run() Tue Sep 12 20:47:52 BST 2023 We don't handle unbound or stopped states in odhcp consumers. I think probably we should do this in odhcp-script by deleting the outputs, rather than making each consumer do it. ... turns out that odhcp6c itself unsets ADDRESSES and PREFIXES before calling the script with "unbound", so maybe we don't need to do anything special. Wed Sep 13 17:55:33 BST 2023 @400000000000001f2723b3cb eth1.link.pppoe Script /nix/store/nyks8zl86dcp44k5sjcc76digrnfgm17-ip-up finished (pid 403), status = 0x0 @400000000000001f27b2db3b eth1.link.pppoe Script /nix/store/ds0lc4qd1zfiyxsva87rpplyr21awjh1-ip6-up finished (pid 404), status = 0x1 @400000000000001f30a7c5c5 /nix/store/v9ijgyywizqbbd9y73r2wifkxc0d1jjm-route-default-1a22c69d0e1f-up: line 4: input: not found @400000000000001f31abf9b5 ip: command line is not complete, try "help" @400000000000001f31ca1395 s6-rc: warning: unable to start service route-default-1a22c69d0e1f: command exited 1 @400000000000001f31f236b4 s6-rc: info: service route-default-d2586cf00da0 successfully started @ Wed Sep 13 18:05:38 BST 2023 TODO - service for dhcp6 client - move acquire-{wan,lan} scripts out of examples/ - service for resolvconf - nftables syntax error - tidy up the dependency handling in serviceDefn build (interface is fine, implementation is a bit brutal) - docs considerations: 1) in some ways, we should be able to specify acquire-{wan,lan} as if they were just additional addresses on the respective interfaces. However, they're longruns so the implementation of "address" doesn't really fit. 2) should they be bundled into a dhcp client service? I think the answer is "no" because which of the dhcp config we want to honour locally (and how) is policy not mechainmsm svc.dhcp6c.client.build { interface = wan; }; svc.dhcp6c.address.build { inherit client; interface = lan; }; svc.dhcp6c.address.build { inherit client; interface = wan; }; svc.dhcp6c.prefix.build { inherit client; interface = lan; index = 1; # default to first interface }; svc.dhcp6c.prefix.build { inherit client; interface = vpn; index = 2; }; Fri Sep 15 12:04:25 BST 2023 Qemu worked example provides dhcp and ssh service Hardware worked example needs to be plugged into same lan as build machine if we are going to tftp the image onto it - so it might be awkward if we run dhcp on it The device I have lying around is the A How do we do the actual flash step? Assuming the device is running stock firmware, from a laptop we can wifi to it and use the web ui to upgrade we can't build the hellonet config because it requires tftp plug in mt300a put stock firmware on it Sun Sep 17 00:08:03 BST 2023 I don't think the user manual needs a full justification of why we have the module/service split. Maybe we should have "decision records" in the git tree instead Sun Sep 17 16:44:31 BST 2023 Can we figure out which bits of the old doc are missing from the new one and just transplant those? Then we can merge it sooner instead of blocking on writig all the new stuff Mon Sep 25 16:58:51 BST 2023 jffs2 on mt300a isn't finding root partition in initramfs, and it seems to be because MTD_SPLIT_UIMAGE_FW isn't working [ 0.426792] spi spi0.0: force spi mode3 [ 0.431305] spi-nor spi0.0: w25q128 (16384 Kbytes) [ 0.436322] 5 fixed-partitions partitions found on MTD device spi0.0 [ 0.442875] OF: Bad cell count for /palmbus@10000000/spi@b00/flash@0/partitions [ 0.450400] OF: Bad cell count for /palmbus@10000000/spi@b00/flash@0/partitions [ 0.458208] OF: Bad cell count for /palmbus@10000000/spi@b00/flash@0/partitions [ 0.465751] OF: Bad cell count for /palmbus@10000000/spi@b00/flash@0/partitions [ 0.473522] Creating 5 MTD partitions on "spi0.0": [ 0.478466] 0x000000000000-0x000000030000 : "u-boot" [ 0.484447] 0x000000030000-0x000000040000 : "u-boot-env" [ 0.490888] 0x000000040000-0x000000050000 : "factory" [ 0.497110] 0x000000050000-0x000000fd0000 : "firmware" [ 0.596423] 0x000000ff0000-0x000001000000 : "art" [ 0.611508] gsw: setting port4 to ephy mode with squashfs root it's the same but for the extra split partitions: [ 0.468715] Creating 5 MTD partitions on "spi0.0": [ 0.473653] 0x000000000000-0x000000030000 : "u-boot" [ 0.479652] 0x000000030000-0x000000040000 : "u-boot-env" [ 0.486085] 0x000000040000-0x000000050000 : "factory" [ 0.492318] 0x000000050000-0x000000fd0000 : "firmware" [ 0.499304] 2 uimage-fw partitions found on MTD device firmware [ 0.505457] Creating 2 MTD partitions on "firmware": [ 0.510543] 0x000000000000-0x000000260000 : "kernel" [ 0.516616] 0x000000260000-0x000000f80000 : "rootfs" [ 0.522570] mtd: device 5 (rootfs) set to be root filesystem [ 0.528565] 0x000000ff0000-0x000001000000 : "art" turns out this is because the device thinks it has 4k erase block size because MTD_SPI_NOR_USE_4K_SECTORS was set, and that was causing mtdsplit to look in the wrong place for a root filesystem Mon Sep 25 18:50:05 BST 2023 No, that wasn't it. Turned out to be an endianness-dependent check for JFFS2 magic in mtdsplit. setenv serverip 10.0.0.1 setenv ipaddr 10.0.0.8 tftp 0xa00000 result/uimage bootm 0xa00000 Fri Sep 29 20:50:39 BST 2023 setenv bootargs 'liminix mtdparts=phram0:M(rootfs) phram.phram=phram0,0x40411f28,4194304,65536 memmap=4194304$0x40411f28 root=/dev/mtdblock0 console=ttyAMA0,115200 earlycon' setenv serverip 10.0.0.1 setenv ipaddr 10.0.0.5 setenv bootargs 'liminix console=ttyS0,115200 panic=10 oops=panic earlycon=uart8250,mmio32,0x11002000 root=/dev/mtdblock0' tftp 0x4007ff28 result/uimage ; tftp 0x40432f28 result/rootfs bootm 0x4007ff28 setenv bootargs 'liminix console=ttyS0,115200 panic=1 oops=panic earlycon root=/dev/mtdblock0' md 0x42ff0000 Cannot find regmap for /infracfg@10000000: -524. # "console=ttyAMA0,38400 panic=10 oops=panic init=/bin/init loglevel=8 root=/dev/mtdblock0 rootfstype=squashfs fw_devlink=off" 40812468: 69726553 203a6c61 41424d41 304c5020 Serial: AMBA PL0 40812478: 55203131 20545241 76697264 3c0a7265 11 UART driver.< 40812488: 61723e33 706f6f6d 61203a73 6165726c 3>ramoops: alrea 40812498: 69207964 6974696e 7a696c61 3c0a6465 dy initialized.< 408124a8: 61723e34 706f6f6d 70203a73 65626f72 4>ramoops: probe 408124b8: 20666f20 66663234 30303030 6d61722e of 42ff0000.ram 408124c8: 73706f6f 69616620 2064656c 68746977 oops failed with 408124d8: 72726520 2d20726f 3c0a3232 61433e33 error -22.<3>Ca 408124e8: 746f6e6e 6e696620 65722064 70616d67 nnot find regmap 408124f8: 726f6620 6e692f20 63617266 31406766 for /infracfg@1 40812508: 30303030 3a303030 32352d20 333c0a34 0000000: -524.<3 40812518: 6e61433e 20746f6e 646e6966 67657220 >Cannot find reg MT7622> 40812528: 2070616d 20726f66 666e692f 66636172 map for /infracf 40812538: 30314067 30303030 203a3030 3432352d g@10000000: -524 40812548: 3e333c0a 6e6e6143 6620746f 20646e69 .<3>Cannot find 40812558: 6d676572 66207061 2f20726f 72666e69 regmap for /infr 40812568: 67666361 30303140 30303030 2d203a30 acfg@10000000: - 40812578: 0a343235 433e333c 6f6e6e61 69662074 524.<3>Cannot fi 40812588: 7220646e 616d6765 6f662070 702f2072 nd regmap for /p 40812598: 63697265 31406766 32303030 3a303030 ericfg@10002000: 408125a8: 32352d20 313c0a34 616e553e 20656c62 -524.<1>Unable 408125b8: 68206f74 6c646e61 656b2065 6c656e72 to handle kernel 408125c8: 67617020 20676e69 75716572 20747365 paging request 408125d8: 76207461 75747269 61206c61 65726464 at virtual addre 408125e8: 66207373 66666666 66666666 66666666 ss fffffffffffff 408125f8: 0a656666 4d3e313c 61206d65 74726f62 ffe.<1>Mem abort CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_FSL=y CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_MT6577=y CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_NR_UARTS=3 CONFIG_SERIAL_8250_RUNTIME_UARTS=3 CONFIG_SERIAL_DEV_BUS=y CONFIG_SERIAL_DEV_CTRL_TTYPORT=y CONFIG_SERIAL_MCTRL_GPIO=y CONFIG_SERIAL_OF_PLATFORM=y Mon Oct 2 10:17:04 BST 2023 We have a bootable aarch64 kernel for the Belkin, but it does not understand the memmap= parameter we're using to protect the phram image from being used as general memory. One option is to add a reserved-memory stanza in the device tree, using u-boot "fdt" command, but we don't know the fdt address in u-boot because it doesn't have any commands to parse the image and set variables pointing at the sub-components. (There's iminfo, but it's onyl human-readable) Second option is to amend the dtb in the tftpboot module: this would mean regenerating the uimage Third option: for tftpboot do we _have_ to use FIT? maybe we could grab the fdt as a separate tftp transaction we need to apply kernel patch 9401911f2d9f89035f7acebab16e72d43d1282fb to avoid using ioremap on sysem ram which is not allowed on arm Tue Oct 3 14:15:38 BST 2023 Progress on Liminix ARM support. The device I'm starting with is the Belkin RT3200 (also known as [Linksys E8450](https://openwrt.org/toh/linksys/e8450)) which seems to be a featureful piece of kit, and whioch I snagged for a very good price on the Bay of E # Where are we right now? * we can TFTP boot it to userland * ethernet works ## What else needs doing? * it has dual band wifi with many interesting features. I've built the * we're only running in RAM, probably need to add some kernel config to support the flash * initramfs support is not yet implemented * the flash is NAND flash and it's quite large compared with the existing Liminix devices, so we're going to add UBIFS which will use it better than JFFS2 does * all this work is on a branch and needs to be cleaned up a lot before I'm letting it into main ## What have we found? There are some significant differences between this and the MIPS devices (yes, other than an entirely different architecture), mostly to do with "legacy boot" support or the lack thereof. For example: * there aren't any options like `MIPS_RAW_APPENDED_DTB` to glom together a kernel and device tree (FDT), because the bootloader is expected to be able to provide a FDT following "standards". U-Boot will do this, provided that we use the newer "FIT" Uimage format which allows a kernel and DTB and initrd to be combined in the same container. (Sadly we can't use FIT everywhere because a lot of MIPS devices use really old forks of U-Boot that don't understand it) * for tftpboot, on MIPS we use the `memmap` kernel command line option to reserve some RAM for the root filesystem. On Arm there's no such option, so we have to add a [reserved-memory](https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/devicetree/bindings/reserved-memory/reserved-memory.yaml) node in the device tree instead. Which means, given that we _only_ want to do this when tftp booting (the memory is wasted otherwise), we have to rewrite the device tree in that scenario. * then it turns out that phram doesn't (didn't) work anyway, because it calls ioremap() and [you can't use ioremap on system memory on ARM](https://lwn.net/Articles/409689/). In newer kernels this is fixed: there is a [conditional](https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/mtd/devices/phram.c#L127) here to use whichever of ioremap or memremap is appropriate for the memory passed to phram, but it looks non-trivial to backport so I've gone for a [much less sophisticated approach](https://gti.telent.net/dan/liminix/commit/f7cd9c2b6e6c99a228e066b09e3febcf71c63fa1#diff-d8e355f1b2dcde7378ebb40c92cdd2ce3125753c) * we're using [DSA](https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/networking/dsa/dsa.txt) instead of the OpenWrt [swconfig](https://openwrt.org/docs/techref/swconfig) program. There was actually surprisingly little work needed to adjust to this. Other than that, it was mostly the usual process of "did the kernel crash silently, or has it just been unable to open a console device?". In this regard, *one neat trick*: even though U-Boot on this device doesn't support pstore, we can use it anyway if we don't do compression. Enable ``` PSTORE = "y"; PSTORE_RAM = "y"; PSTORE_CONSOLE = "y"; PSTORE_DEFLATE_COMPRESS = "n"; ``` then boot with `panic=3 oops=panic`, then when it resets use the U_Boot `md` command to see what happened: ``` MT7622> md 0x42ff0000 42ff0000: 43474244 00000000 00000ff4 3d3d3d3d DBGC........==== 42ff0010: 39342e31 36373031 500a442d 63696e61 1.491076-D.Panic 42ff0020: 50203123 31747261 3e363c0a 20505050 #1 Part1.<6>PPP 42ff0030: 20445342 706d6f43 73736572 206e6f69 BSD Compression [....] 42ff0ca0: 20676e69 73756e75 6b206465 656e7265 ing unused kerne 42ff0cb0: 656d206c 79726f6d 3731203a 0a4b3832 l memory: 1728K. 42ff0cc0: 523e363c 2f206e75 74696e69 20736120 <6>Run /init as 42ff0cd0: 74696e69 6f727020 73736563 3e373c0a init process.<7> ``` Wed Oct 4 21:08:44 BST 2023 By randomly including chinks of the openwrt config we have made it find the mt7915e on the pcie bus. I just don't yet know which bit of the openwrt config it was. It doesn't actually work yet though. 5GHz wifi gets calibration data from the flash, so it is not going to work unless (1) we reflash the firmware partition, or (2) we find another way to provide it calibration data. https://forum.openwrt.org/t/belkin-rt3200-linksys-e8450-wifi-ax-discussion/94302/401 Sat Oct 7 22:56:40 BST 2023 We're almost ready to merge the rt3200 support (it's not finished but it mostly won't break mips) except for the uimage module which needs all that FIT stuff, and the tftpboot contortions to amend the dtb for memmap For legacy uimage 1) add commandline params to dtb 2) objcopy fdt into vmlinux.elf 3) strip to raw image and compress 4) mkimage For FIT uimage 1) add commandline params to dtb 2) strip to raw image and compress 3) create its file 4) mkimage Do we still want to handle the no-dtb case? what about standards-compliant boot, where u-boot is providing the dtb? No option to provide a commandline in that case, but maybe also no need to. For tftpboot, am undecided. We could use the dtb rewriting thing everywhere, in the interest of consistency. Mon Oct 9 20:45:54 BST 2023 we bumped the kernel entry point to the 32MB mark, as (1) when using jffs2 (big rootfs image) it was clobbering the dtb at the end of the filesystem (2) it should be 2MB aligned anyway and wasn't However, this has given us the next problem: OF: fdt: Reserved memory: failed to reserve memory for node 'secmon@43000000': base 0x00000000430B OF: reserved mem: OVERLAP DETECTED! phram-rootfs (0x0000000040400000--0x0000000053a31488) overlaps with ramoops@42ff0000 (0x000000004) Zone ranges: DMA [mem 0x0000000040000000-0x000000005fffffff] DMA32 empty Normal empty Movable zone start for each node the end of that phram-rootfs region looks well sus. [ turns out that decimal is not hex ] Tue Oct 10 21:37:31 BST 2023 UBI bleurgh ... The DTB for this device, and/or the OpenWrt installer, seems to expect already that mtd4 is a UBI thing mtdinfo -a says: mtd4 Name: ubi Type: nand Eraseblock size: 131072 bytes, 128.0 KiB Amount of eraseblocks: 1000 (131072000 bytes, 125.0 MiB) Minimum input/output unit size: 2048 bytes Sub-page size: 2048 bytes OOB size: 64 bytes Character device major/minor: 90:8 Bad blocks are allowed: true Device is writable: true <5>UBI: auto-attach mtd4 <5>ubi0: attaching mtd4 <5>ubi0: scanning is finished <5>ubi0: attached mtd4 (name "ubi", size 125 MiB) <5>ubi0: PEB size: 131072 bytes (128 KiB), LEB size: 126976 bytes <5>ubi0: min./max. I/O unit sizes: 2048/2048, sub-page size 2048 we made a volume using "ubimkvol /dev/ubi0 -N liminix -S 825" and from ubinfo -a we can see 0 ubootenv 1 ubootenv2 2 recovery 3 boot_backup 4 liminix Now we could use "ubiupdatevol /dev/ubi0_4 /path/to/ubifs.img" to put a ubifs on that volume, but obviously we'd have to boot the device into Liminix somehow first. Alternatively in the build environment we could use ubinize to create the entire image that can be flashed to MTD, but - this will overwrite erase counters. - we have to give it a config file that describes all the volumes, and I'm guessing they need to match up with the existing ones otherwise we trash the uboot env Wed Oct 11 17:37:09 BST 2023 We can write ubi volumes from u-boot. Let's for the moment use mkfs.ubifs and tftp those files to u-boot - we can figure out the ubinize dance later We need either (a) to write an analogue of our jffs2 graft option for mkfs.ubifs, or (b) to have a "cpio-like" mkfs.ubifs variant that reads filenames on stdin and writes only those, or (c) to create a "staging" directory during build with all the store folders that need to go into the filesystem although the least elegant, option (c) is the simplest and probably not even slow, at least by comparison with unpacking the kernel source tarball we used uboot> tftpboot 0x40400000 result/rootfs uboot> ubi write 40400000 liminix $filesize then can use ubifsmount ubi0:liminix ; ubifsls / to check that it wrote something valid. To boot this: setenv serverip 10.0.0.1 setenv ipaddr 10.0.0.8 setenv bootargs 'liminix console=ttyS0,115200 panic=10 oops=panic init=/bin/init loglevel=8 root=ubi0:liminix rootfstype=ubifs fw_devlink=off' tftpboot 0x4007ff28 result/uimage bootm 0x4007ff28 The other thing we had to fix here is that activate wasn't being built statically. Have to add -Xlinker -static to CFLAGS - I don't know if this is a no-op on MIPS Mon Oct 16 20:51:08 BST 2023 Here's a thing: the u-boot installed by openwrt on this device has a ubifsload command, and it has a writable ubootenv. So instead of having a separate partition for the kernel we could put the kernel in the actual filesystem I think we should do this by excluding flashimage and including some other module (to be written) instead. ubimage or somesuch, perhaps. So the image we wish to create is a ubifs with a kernel inside it in /boot and we also need to change the u-boot env value of boot_production=led $bootled_pwr on ; run ubi_read_production && bootm $loadaddr#$bootconf ; led $bootled_pwr off so that it mounts the rootfs and finds /boot/uimage inside it From uboot this is setenv and saveenv; from a running linux this is fw_setenv Thu Oct 19 09:34:15 BST 2023 setenv bootargs 'liminix console=ttyS0,115200 panic=10 oops=panic init=/bin/init loglevel=8 root=ubi0:liminix rootfstype=ubifs fw_devlink=off' ubifsmount ubi0:liminix ubifsload 4007ff28 boot/uimage bootm 0x4007ff28 Thu Oct 19 23:11:17 BST 2023 Assuming you've done the openwrt installer to repartion the device, what are the steps to install Liminix? 1) build rootfs, which incorporates kernel 2) from u-boot: uboot> ubimkvol /dev/ubi0 -N liminix -S 825 uboot> tftpboot 0x40400000 result/rootfs uboot> ubi write 40400000 liminix $filesize uboot> setenv boot_production 'led $bootled_pwr on ; ubifsmount ubi0:liminix; ubifsload 4007ff28 boot/uimage; bootm 4007ff28' What if we don't have a serial console? can we do all this from openwrt? Fri Oct 27 23:21:08 BST 2023 setenv serverip 10.0.0.1 setenv ipaddr 10.0.0.8 setenv bootargs 'liminix earlyprintk earlycon=uart8250,mmio32,0xf1012000 ramoops.mem_address=0x8000000 ramoops.mem_size=0x40000 ramoops=max_reason=2 mem=128M earlycon=ttyS0 console=ttyS0,115200 panic=10 oops=panic init=/bin/init loglevel=8 root=ubi0:liminix rootfstype=ubifs fw_devlink=off' setenv bootargs 'liminix ramoops.mem_address=0x8000000 ramoops.mem_size=0x40000 ramoops=max_reason=2 mem=128M console=ttyS0,115200 panic=10 oops=panic init=/bin/init loglevel=8 root=ubi0:liminix rootfstype=ubifs fw_devlink=off' tftpboot ${kernel_addr_r} result bootm ${kernel_addr_r} --- this is potentially worth checkng out because we do have very slow decompress speed https://scm.linefinity.com/common/u-boot/commit/5818198e6a184963c6afc82178b23a64435ace6a Commit 5bb2c550b1 ("arm: mvebu: Move internal registers in arch_very_early_init() function") implemented code movement according to (now incomplete) comments which resulted in semi-broken code. The result is that I-cache is currently disabled for all Armada 38x boards and maybe there are some other (unreported / undetected) issues. [...] After this change lzmadec command with lzma image of 0x7000000 bytes is doing decompression just 5 seconds. Before this change it was 30 seconds. Mon Oct 30 21:03:55 GMT 2023 We have a kernel that boots on the Omnia, now we need to build a rootfs. Given this device uses mmc for its primary storage, we should use a block filesystem not a flash filesystem. setenv serverip 10.0.0.1 setenv ipaddr 10.0.0.8 setenv bootargs 'liminix console=ttyS0,115200 panic=10 oops=panic init=/bin/init loglevel=8 root=/dev/mtdblock0 rootfstype=ext4fs fw_devlink=off mtdparts=phram0:22M(rootfs) phram.phram=phram0,0x1300000,23068672,65536 root=/dev/mtdblock0' tftpboot 0x1000000 tftpboot/uimage ; tftpboot 0x1300000 tftpboot/dtb ; tftpboot 0x29b0000 tftpboot/dtb; tftpboot 0x29c0000 initrd.img Sat Nov 4 12:22:37 GMT 2023 setenv serverip 10.0.0.1 setenv ipaddr 10.0.0.8 setenv bootargs 'liminix console=ttyS0,115200 panic=10 oops=panic init=/bin/init loglevel=8 root=/dev/mtdblock0 rootfstype=ext4 fw_devlink=off mtdparts=phram0:22M(rootfs) phram.phram=phram0,0x40300000,23068672,65536 root=/dev/mtdblock0' tftpboot 0x40000800 tftpboot/uimage ; tftpboot 0x419b0800 tftpboot/dtb ; tftpboot 0x41a00000 initrd.img ; tftpboot 0x40300000 tftpboot/rootfs bootm 0x40000800 0x41a00000 0x419b0800 kernel 0x40000800 + 2af400 = "402afc00" rootfs 0x40300000 + 15f9400 = "418f9400" dtb 0x419b0800 + 4e00 = "419b5600" Sun Nov 5 00:01:56 GMT 2023 Open questions 1) using -device loader for qemu phram, how do we choose appropriate start address for all architectures? we could try to unify this with the tftpboot approach, but that would mean providing the dtb ourselves somehow which seems silly when qemu already does it 2) flash erase block size for tftpboot phram, it need to match the hardware - we don't use it at all for squashfs - for jffs2 it needs to match if tftpboot is to use same rootfs image as flash - we don't have any way to do a tftpboot ubifs - ext4 doesn't care 3) the rootfstype needs thought. - for all but squashfs it implies an initramfs - jffs2 can be flashed naively - ubifs needs an installer to not clobber erase counts - ext4 (for omnia) needs a block device and can't be flashed along with the kernel/initramfs because it's a separate disk. or maybe the omnia can load kernel from mmc? phram plus mtd_block is ok for ext4 for qemu, so that's one thing fewer to deal with 4) for tftpboot with a separate initramfs, is there any way to make address selection easier? 5) ubifs needs a different set of flash parameters (PEB, LEB etc) Tue Nov 7 23:19:10 GMT 2023 We can flash the turris omnia from a USB stick https://docs.turris.cz/hw/omnia/rescue-modes/ it looks for omnia-medkit-latest.tar.gz and (I'm guessing) just unpacks it onto the emmc. Perhaps we need per-device installation instructions in the docs. * rename defaultOutput to installerOutput * attach some docs to the various options for installerOutput * add a link from the device's rendered manual section to the relevant installer output doc do we expect that outputs will build on each other? e.g. turris omnia output is basically a tarball (other devices might want this too) but with docs describing how to reset the device and hold the button down until the led flashes four times (other devices probably won't want this). maybe the model here is that the turris output is a directory with a symlink to the tarball and an informative README containing the instructions. Although we also want the instructions in the manual where people can read them before building anything. Fri Nov 10 21:27:50 GMT 2023 Realising now that outputs and installers aren't the same thing. e.g. flashimage can be installed from u-boot or from kexecboot perhaps we distinguish between the "installation image": - firmware.bin - tarball - ubifs image - kernel + rootfs and "installer" - kexecboot script - u-boot script to flash squashfs image Sun Nov 12 17:17:30 GMT 2023 What TODO? - "does the kernel live on the filesystem" depends on the bootloader not the filesystem - could we implement this with a module that adds to config.filesystem ? it would depend on whether the bootloader can follow symlinks to files not in /boot (probably fine unless crossing filesystems) - the other question is how much futzing around in u-boot can/do we do to tell u-boot how to boot? for grown-up u-boot it's not a problem as we can saveenv but are there broken u-boots that would prevent this? - kexecboot is unloved and documented in the wrong place. do we have a test for it even? - it won't work on aarch64 because it needs memmap= - hardcodes memory size, which we should probably work out dynamically - how to put device name into the device docs maybe devices - make config.boot.commandLine a single string - finish omnia - for installation on turris omnia we need tarball not ext4 image (but keep the ext4 image anyway for tftpboot and possibly kexecboot) [done] - now we have lim.parseInt should we use it consistently? - usefulness tiers for devices ("stable", "experimental", "wip") - params for ubi(fs) are a mess - create an l2tp configuration - iperf and tuning - wlan country code Fri Nov 17 17:30:39 GMT 2023 kexec is fraught. I spent some time trying (unsuccesfully) to get a kexecboot test running, but it doesn't work in qemu for the reason that the kernel I built for qemu has SMP support but does not have kexec_nonboot_cpu_func() - which is the needed function to stop non-boot CPUs before jumping into the new kernel. That this code is all MIPS-specific (I have to assume that other architectures have entirely different ways to stop non-boot CPUs?) is a bit worrisome: how many other ways is kexec hardware-dependent? We have two scenarios where we may want to use it: 1) the "installer": e.g. for UBI platforms, we want to plonk a new ubifs on the device without clobbering the erase counters, which means either doing it from U-Boot - needs serial connection - or doing it from a Linux of some kind that is not running on the filesystem we're toasting. 2) reinstalling after the initial install - this is a big deal for squashfs where there is no other way to change data, and an only slightly smaller deal for jffs2, where there isn't much room to change much data. Maybe instead of kexec we could do this by stopping services and then pivot_root into a ramfs. We would, I assume, need to stop any processes that have open files on the root fs, but we would need to have network interfaces running. So we need a subset of services that run in recovery: can make this a bundle * mount a ramfs * copy the closure of the bundle into the ramfs * stop all processes (including init?) sending pid 1 a signal FOO will cause it to run .s6-svscan/SIGFOO Fri Nov 17 23:53:43 GMT 2023 So we need to extend .s6-svscan/finish to if test -e /maintenance/bin/init cd /maintenance mount --bind /maintenance/ / chroot . exec /bin/init -D maintenance fi foreground { if { test -e /maintenance/bin/init } cd /maintenance foreground { mount --move /maintenance/ / } foreground { chroot . } redirfd -r 0 /dev/console redirfd -w 1 /dev/console fdmove -c 2 1 emptyenv /bin/init -D maintenance } ${s6-linux-init}/bin/s6-linux-init-hpr -fr https://openwrt.org/docs/techref/sysupgrade s6-svscanctl -t /run/service Sun Nov 19 10:23:17 GMT 2023 # cat `type -p reboot` #!/nix/store/0v3q2lnh7bwg0ldk24lzmsdnmidmdvm6-execline-mips-unknown-linux-musl-2.9.3.0-bin/bin/execlineb -S0 /nix/store/j41b85ccx0rmf7lm5g13zqb7fs68l8y2-s6-linux-init-mips-unknown-linux-musl-1.1.1.0-bin/bin/s6-linux-init-hpr -r \$@ s6-linux-init-hpr calls hpr_send("", 0) then hpr_shutdown(what, &tain_zero, 0)) which sends "Shpr"[what] to SCANDIRFULL "/" SHUTDOWND_SERVICEDIR "/" SHUTDOWND_FIFO which I assume is s6-linux-init-shutdownd.c it calls prepare_shutdown on socket read, which sets deadline, grace_time. later (when?) it calls run_stage3(basedir) ; # we can see this by adding a message to rc.shutdown # this causes s6-rc services to be downed gently s6-rc -v2 -bDa change prepare_stage4(basedir, what) creates a file STAGE4_FILE with the contents: s6-linux-init-umountall scripts/rc.shutdown.final s6-linux-init-hpr -f -r unsupervise_tree() ; goes through /run/service/*/supervise/control fifos except shutdownd and logger, sending "d" to each then does s6_svc_write(SCANDIRFULL "/" S6_SVSCAN_CTLDIR "/control", "an", 2) (this is a rescan not a terminate) #define SCANDIRFULL S6_LINUX_INIT_TMPFS "/" S6_LINUX_INIT_SCANDIR (works out to be /run/service "/" ".s6-svscan") ls kill(-1, SIGTERM) ; s6-rc -v2 -bDa change cd /run/service for i in s6-linux-init-runleveld s6rc-oneshot-runner s6rc-fdholder eth* getty ; do s6-svc -d /run/service/$i; done s6-rc -v2 -bDa change cd /run/service for i in s6-linux-init-runleveld s6rc-oneshot-runner s6rc-fdholder eth* ; do s6-svc -d /run/service/$i; done s6-svscanctl -an /run/service Wed Nov 22 22:01:02 GMT 2023 - define a subset of services that run in maintenance mode. - write a command that copies the closure of this bundle into /run/maintenance - create enough non-store filesystem (proc dev etc) to make it run Thu Nov 23 00:09:44 GMT 2023 I was as surprised as anybody that this seems to work, at least insofar as it has started a busybox sh process. there is a serious deficit of symlinks to busybox, so almost no shell scripts work. and I think we need an rc.init It would be worth tidying up the main s6 run-image quite a lot before we go further with this We'd like to be able to reuse the s6 pseudofile structure (/etc/s6-rc and /etc/s6-linux-init) but we can't make it a derivation because it's pseudofiles (with funny permissions) not real files. Maybe we can invoke the module as a function? Fri Nov 24 23:29:48 GMT 2023 Turris TODO - see if network works (eth[012], which is which?) - wireless drivers [DONE] ath9k and ath10k, it's like old times https://docs.turris.cz/hw/omnia/omnia/#turris-omnia-wi-fi-6 (note: other variant of the device has a MT7915AN, should we add support for that as well?) - [DONE] feed the watchdog it looks like compiling watchdog support is sufficient to stop the thing from rebooting after three minutes, there is no need to actually feed it from userspace. - "does the kernel live on the filesystem" depends on the bootloader not the filesystem - could we implement this with a module that adds to config.filesystem ? it would depend on whether the bootloader can follow symlinks to files not in /boot (probably fine unless crossing filesystems) - the other question is how much futzing around in u-boot can/do we do to tell u-boot how to boot? for grown-up u-boot it's not a problem as we can saveenv but are there broken u-boots that would prevent this? - perhaps we need different boot "recipes" - e.g. some device might want boot.scr and another something different - create installable tarball and test - gpio thingy for SFP switching - iperf - document the watchdog - remove kexecboot? it's unloved and documented in the wrong place. do we have a test for it even? - it won't work on aarch64 because it needs memmap= - hardcodes memory size, which we should probably work out dynamically - how to put device name into the device docs - [WONT] make config.boot.commandLine a single string this sounds sensible but it just makes it harder to put useful comments against command line fragments so that we know why they're there - usefulness tiers for devices ("stable", "experimental", "wip") - params for ubi(fs) are a mess - iperf and tuning - wlan country code - create an l2tp configuration Sun Nov 26 15:37:07 GMT 2023 hatching a plan ... we could do "predictable" network interfaces like this: . add a devpath attr to network/link.nix . get the kernel-issued name from "/sys${devpath}/net" . use ip link set ${oldname} name ${newname} if we had the full iproute2 thng we could keep the old name as well: # ip link property add dev wan altname eth1 maybe we could do this with lua/netlink? no support in there currently for RTM_NEWLINKPROP though Maybe we'll skip doing the altname. The attraction of it is that it means the existing name isn't removed, so there's no possibility of a race. The kernel will allocate eth0 when asked for eth%d and there is no eth0. This might be the case where eth0 previously existed but it just got renamed to lan Sun Nov 26 21:20:23 GMT 2023 The wrinkle here is ifwait: using netlink we can't wait for an interface by devpath but have to do it by name - which is a problem if the interface is not yet present, because there won't be a devpath in which to look up the name until it is. So we need a new flow - wait for devpath to exist - get the ifindex (which shouldn't change, even if the name does) - churn rtnetlink messages for that index We don't want to poll the sysfs file, but we can check it whenever we get a netlink message Sun Nov 26 22:33:16 GMT 2023 There is no way to refer to the hardware device for a bridge interface by sysfs path because it has none. This is probably true of other virtual devices as well. ls: cannot access '/sys/class/net/vbridge0/device': No such file or directory Also, there is no way to refer to the _netdevice_ of a hardware interface without also knowing its default name, which doesn't help us if enumeration changes ls /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:01.0/0000:01:00.0/net/ enp1s0 So we should only be specifying devices by devpath if they're hardware devices discovered by the kernel, not synthetic devices (that we pick the name of anyway). So maybe we don't need to rewrite ifwait, we just do it after renaming the device Wed Nov 29 21:28:37 GMT 2023 How do we name outputs? fileystem image with-boot filesystem image (e.g. ubifs for belkin) tarball with-boot tarball (e.g. omnia) flashable combined image of kernel + filesystem (e.g. gl-mt*) kernel + filesystem image + dtb + tftpboot glue kernel + filesystem image + qemu script we could add initramfs as a separate thing for tftpboot and qemu (and FIT images) but it would mean not sharing a kernel with the outputs that require embedded initramfs we can enable with-boot variants of outputs by adding a boot.loader config option. if we go that route, can we use config options to drive the whole output thingy? We could have a config option that just changes "defaultOutput" but is that useful? Maybe the question is: we can choose a different output at build time rather than editing configuration - how often is this useful? I think tftpboot vs installable is about the only case. adding a /boot to a filesystem differs from making a combined flashable image because it is a config change and not a composition of two other already-built outputs. we could have done tftpboot that way as well, but we chose to unpack and repack the fdt so we don't have to build two kernels - and also so that we can have both outputs from the same configuration without editing any files. for tftpboot we don't want to make the filesystem embed the kernel if we need a separate kernel for booting (guessing we can't usually make u-boot loopback mount a downloaded filesystem image). so that points to not making it a config option, _or_ to making the inclusion logic (hardware wants a kernel in filesystem) && !(output == tftpboot) which itself means the output somehow needs to be injected into the config nix-build -I liminix-config=./examples/hello-from-mt300.nix --arg device "import ./devices/my-device" --arg output=tftpboot let's see if we can not do that? repacking a ubifs to add /boot is awkward and unpleasant Thu Nov 30 14:33:08 GMT 2023 ~~We need a new boot-in-rootfs output which calls rootfs with (config.filesystem // { /boot ... }) when the device boot type is extlinux~~ ~~Do we need to put it in systemConfiguration as well? Yes, otherwise liminix-rebuild won't install it~~ We may have a problem here actually: if /boot is only set up after reboot, by adding a link while running the initramfs, how did the bootloader find the kernel to boot in the first place? So we need /boot to exist and to point to the new kernel before rebooting into it, so we need to create it as a real directory along with /nix/store when making the filesystem, instead of relying on activate which will be too late. maybe we could extract the root directory structure creation as a separate output from rootfs, then there is a single place to put "and also add /boot" we will need to update pkgs/min-copy-closure/liminix-rebuild.sh to add /boot we could make the contents of /boot a derivation and then /boot itself is just a symlink to it. we would need to ensure that the derivation is part of the system closure, though Sat Dec 2 15:33:07 GMT 2023 - make rootfs the directory structure Sun Dec 3 23:31:35 GMT 2023 Spent too much of the weekend first fighting run-liminix-vm.sh and then rewriting it in Fennel, but we are now at the point that we can boot u-boot in qemu. However, it maps the rootfs into high memory where phram can find it, instead of putting it into a flash that _qemu_ can see as flash, so u-boot is not able to boot the kernel or at least not in a similar-to-hardware fashion. Once we've added that, we need to write a test for boots-a-kernel-in-the-filesystem Mon Dec 4 19:46:58 GMT 2023 We wanted a test that we are creating an image that u-boot can boot using extlinux. Turns out that u-boot only has scripts to do this in the case that the storage device has a partition table. Which is representative of the Omnia mmc, but maybe not going to work for jffs2/ubifs (For ubifs it might be OK, there's some concept of partitions ubifs_boot=if ubi part ${bootubipart} ${bootubioff} && ubifsmount ubi0:${bootubivol}; then devtype=ubi; devnum=ubi0; bootfstype=ubifs; distro_bootpart=${bootubivol}; run scan_dev_for_boot; ubifsumount; fi ) So what do we need? a disk image with a partition table and an ext4fs image in the only partition, and that partition to be bootable. Then run-liminix-vm gets a --disk-image option which causes it to use U-Boot instead of direct load (can we wrap it with something that sets up the paths so it can find u-boot and qemu?) ok, we're going to define outputs.diskimage which is like outputs.flashimage but it has a partition table. Then we can make a qemu configuration with an ext4 filesystem and defaultOutput="diskimage" and config.boot.loader.extlinux.enable = true sfdisk default behaviour for GPT partitioned disk is to start at sector 2048 (sectors are 512 bytes) Device Start End Sectors Size Type disk.bin1 2048 14335 12288 6M Linux filesystem Tue Dec 5 23:54:22 GMT 2023 Need mbr not gpt. At least, it takes up less space and it doesn't inveigle us into EFI boot. This is close to working except that it doesn't want to boot a uimage Enter choice: 1 1: Liminix Retrieving file: /boot/initramfs Retrieving file: /boot/kernel.gz append: console=ttyAMA0 panic=10 oops=panic init=/bin/init loglevel=8 root=/dev/mtdblock0 rootfstype=ext4 fw_devlink=off zimage: Bad magic! Thu Dec 7 19:33:02 GMT 2023 virtio devices don't have standard major/minor so we can't create device nodes for them at build time. Either we mount devtmpfs in the initramfs (do we then have to move it to /target?) or we parse the /sys/block/vda/vda1/dev node to get 253:1 or whatever Fri Dec 8 16:36:07 GMT 2023 We'd like to remove the ugly special handling of qemu dtb. Here are some thoughts 1) qemu provides its guest the correct DTB for the configured hardware. This is a desirable thing and we wish more platforms did it, so would like not to replace it with a static dtb if we can avoid that 2) so we need some kind of config option that says "platform provides the device tree" (or alternatively, "we need a static dtb, platform doesn't provide it"). config.boot.platformProvidesDeviceTree Monday so where are we? we've removed the need for every hardware device to be able to build flashimage, because not every hw device (looking at you, bellkin/turris) works like that. for the belkin we can have imports = [ modules/outputs/ubimage ] and extlinux enabled for the nwa from Raito we'd like to have imports = [ modules/outputs/ubimage ] but the bootloader is mtd partition-based (or ubi volume? check?) - so ubimage needs to know how to do that perhaps we need an output for "smash together a kernel and a filesystem image that does not also contain a kernel, and don't put a partition table on the front" diskimage { partitionType = "mtd" ; # or "mbr" or maybe "gpt" partitions = [ o.uimage o.rootfs ]; } for the turris we need to check but proceeding on the assumption it wants a tarball with extlinux enabled https://docs.turris.cz/geek/schnapps/schnapps/#export-and-import https://wiki.turris.cz/en/howto/omnia_booting_from_external_storage if we adopt this as our installation format then we are not reformatting the flash and will keep the btrfs that the device was shipped with. https://forum.turris.cz/t/update-to-5-1-x-by-medkit/13986/12 suggests that we could install a custom medkit from the vendor OS => btrsubvol mmc 0:1 ID 257 parent 5 name /@ ID 259 parent 5 name /@factory there don't seem to be any other btr commands in u-boot Tue Dec 12 14:38:53 GMT 2023 from the source code, to get to the various omnia revovery modes uboot> setenv omnia_reset 3 # or 1..n uboot> setenv boot_targets rescue uboot> boot // reset boot_targets to default value. Tue Dec 12 22:44:34 GMT 2023 The hold-down-reset-until-n-leds-flash support depends quite heavily on the post-boot Linux environment, in that it appears to be passing omniarescue=3 rescue_mode=3 to the kernel command line -> pid 1 cmdline On the other hand, it is described as being able to boot from usb stick if there's a boot.scr on the usb stick, so maybe we just do that. The installation process could then be "boot usb, dd the disk image to mmc, reboot, remove usb, realise we got the wrong root=". Hmm. * Could we edit extlinux.conf for first boot? But bear in mind it's a link to a store file. * Could we have extlinux.conf point at mmc0 and somehow override it for the usb stick boot? * Could preinit try multiple root mounts until it gets one that works? * maybe we could detect omniarescue on kernel command line and switch to usb root? * maybe outputs.usbstick could generate a customised rootfs image? it might be unworkable to (narrator: it boots from mmc0 first and usb stick second, so that's not particularly useful) Device 0: Vendor: SanDisk Rev: 1.00 Prod: Cruzer Blade Type: Removable Hard Disk Capacity: 7632.0 MB = 7.4 GB (15630336 x 512) ... is now current device Scanning usb 0:1... No EFI system partition fdt_find_or_add_subnode: chosen: FDT_ERR_BADSTRUCTURE ERROR: /chosen node create failed - must RESET the board to recover. Thu Dec 14 15:32:39 GMT 2023 from the omnia rescue image, we have ## Loading kernel from FIT Image at 01700000 ... Load Address: 0x00800000 Entry Point: 0x00800000 int lzmaBuffToBuffDecompress(unsigned char *outStream, SizeT *uncompressedSize, const unsigned char *inStream, SizeT length) err = image_decomp(os.comp, load, os.image_start, os.type, load_buf, image_buf, image_len, CONFIG_SYS_BOOTM_LEN, &load_end); configs/mvebu_db_armada8k_defconfig:CONFIG_SYS_BOOTM_LEN=0x800000 default 0x4000000 if PPC || ARM64 default 0x1000000 if X86 || ARCH_MX6 || ARCH_MX7 default 0x800000 Fri Dec 15 19:21:53 GMT 2023 Let's put some English words on the page to explain the above gibberish. Since I upgraded the U-Boot on my Turris Omnia, it has stopped being able to tftpboot. Uncompressing Kernel Image lzma compressed: uncompress error 7 Must RESET board to recover "uncompress error 7" means there is not enough space in the output buffer, and the output buffer is set by CONFIG_SYS_BOOTM_LEN which is 8192k, smaller than the uncompressed 12104200 of our kernel. So how can we fix? * one possibility is to do what the turris rescue mode does: build an uncompressed uimage and then lzma the result. u-boot can uncompress the received file using lzmadec command. we'd want to do this without breaking tftpboot on every other device that might not have an lzmadec command * is there bloat in the kernel we could trim? probably not 4MB of it * we could build a custom u-boot with a bigger buffer. this _might_ not be a completely stupid idea as it's only the people prepared to open the box that would be doing tftp workflows anyway, so provided it's possible to replace u-boot without bricking it * we could try building zimage instead of uimage and use bootz to start it Sat Dec 16 11:15:56 GMT 2023 there is another use case for weird tftpboot derivation, which is the device Raito has ported to where you need to wave a magic chicken at u-boot on each command line Sat Dec 16 23:32:11 GMT 2023 Turns out that even when using an uncompressed uimage, u-boot runs the code to check the decompressed size, so that doesn't help at all. But booting a zImage works fine. I am committing a first pass of modules/outputs/tftpbootlz.nix which does this using a lot of copy-paste and (ironically) no lzma stuff at all. Sun Dec 17 16:25:30 GMT 2023 it's started failing to mount root on arm32 because it's not recognising the reserved-memory and something is trashing the phram filesystem reserved-memory { phram-rootfs { reg = <0x1400000 0x1900000>; compatible = "phram"; }; }; Sun Dec 17 17:13:54 GMT 2023 * We need to write the fdt phram differently on 64 bit vs 32 bit (address-cells and size-cells should be 2 or 1) * this might be why it wasn't working on mips (can we test this somehow in qemu or do we need to plug a device in?) qemu user-mode networking has a builtin tftp server. so we need a test that builds the tftpboot target for each qemu arch, and then does run-liminix-vm with the --lan and --u-boot options, then drives it with expect * maybe tftpboot[lz] could be reintegrated with the regular one somehow Fri Dec 22 15:11:35 GMT 2023 We have a working test for tftpboot, on all platforms, which took a while. * tftpbootlz needs to be updated with what we learned, or merged back into it * omnia install - build a stripped-down installer image which can be put on a usb stick - from openwrt on the device, use fw_setenv to set boot order - boot into the installer image- reformat the emmc as per requirements - PREFIX=/mnt liminix-rebuild - profit Could we liminix-rebuild into /some/prefix/nix/store this would actually be useful both for this boot-from-usb scenario and for levitate. Looks like min-copy-closure doesn't need anything much on the destination system except a working sshd and maybe an empty /nix/store and /persist. Potentially we could even do it without chroot (which would save running a second sshd), just add a prefix on the paths what's the fallback? we're not touching the turris rescue system (which is in nor flash) so we can expect all the knightrider modes to continue to workto be able to boot back into that and restore the vendor os? I think so Fri Dec 22 16:56:40 GMT 2023 If we're going to use fw_setenv to change boot order, we could equally well boot from tftp and not need the usb stick fw_setenv boot_targets "tftp mmc0 nvme0 scsi0 usb0 pxe dhcp" setenv bootcmd_tftp "echo TFTP BOOT" how can we get a tftp boot into few enough characters to reasonably put it in an environment variable? - use dhcp? - embed bootargs into the fdt Fri Dec 22 21:10:53 GMT 2023 * dtb needs size and offset of uncompressed root filesystem to add reserved-memory and cmdline params * setting these in the dtb will change the size of the dtb * am assuming that we don't want the kernel to relocate into ram that clashes with the root fs * should we care about phys mem fragmentation? conclusion: hardware.loadAddress tftp.loadAddress uimage or zimage dtb compressed root [ should we rename hardware.loadAddress to something that expresses more clearly it's the _kernel_ load address? ] [ another thing we need to do is stop building two kernels because the uimage and zimage derivations are different ] Sat Dec 23 18:07:43 GMT 2023 Addendum: for a zimage we need the compressed kernel to be at the highest address, otherwise it prints "Starting" and then hangs indefinitely. I believe this to be because the kernel decompressor sets up a stack directly after the compressed payload, so will trash the fdt if it was also there. The bug didn't exhibit on Turris Omnia with the same layout, but maybe that was just luck. Sat Dec 23 18:11:04 GMT 2023 Here is scope of work for Turris: (I) we need to build a suitable tftpboot image for recovery/install. - disk partitioning tools and mkfs stuff - kernel with all the filesystems - dhcp client for connecting to wired network (II) we need instructions for building the real system and using min-copy-closure to copy and install the system configuration of the real one into /mnt (III) probably try the same recovery image as a USB stick (IV) I've lost track of what we're doing with /boot, does that work? (V) gpio thingy for SFP switching (VI) iperf, performance testing (VII) put device name and usefulness tiers ("stable", "experimental", "wip") in the docs (VIII) params for ubi(fs) are a mess (IX) wlan country code Tue Dec 26 16:23:37 GMT 2023 I seem to have lost a chunk of notes here. Have added systemConfiguration/bin/install which does the stuff to copy the right files into /bin and wherever. There is currently no test for it though We could further simplify liminix-rebuild by adding --reboot as a flag to install Tue Dec 26 21:38:43 GMT 2023 To be any use, the test needs to be end-to-end - as in, rather than just checking some files are copied, test that the machine rebooted successfully Fri Dec 29 18:36:16 GMT 2023 Our test for liminix-rebuild uses qemu block device and ext4 instead of phram because -device loader doesn't seem to survive a reboot. And it needs some free space in the ext4 partition inside the mbr image so that it can install new stuff. However, the filesystem is sized to be near-full. If the mbrimage output is to be much use, probably there should be some way of telling it how big the disk is. Maybe it should use hardware.flash.size? UBI also does a bad job of integrating into the hardware.flash hierarchy (but ubi is also more complicated as the ubi volumes are "nested" inside an MTD partition) To move forwards with this test I think I will make it not depend on mbrimage for now, but we have to come back to this. Maybe importing the mbrimage module provides new hardware.disk = { partitions, size etc} config options. Sun Dec 31 23:52:04 GMT 2023 https://developer.ridgerun.com/wiki/index.php/Setting_up_fw_printenv_to_modify_u-boot_environment_variables#Preparing_the_fw_env.config_file can we extract the fw_env config data somehow to produce an appropriate file for the device? the device config needs to specify partition name and offset at minimum, possibly also size. we can create a service that writes the config based on those values. but if we are to be using fw_setenv from the shell, there is no service which depends on that service. whatever defines the service also needs to add it to system.services so that the recovery system can specify it Sat Jan 6 12:30:27 GMT 2024 How do we min-copy-closure to the device when we don't have anything hooked to the LAN port? It's rather easy to break the WAN connection when it involves going out to the internet and back * Don't want to plug it into the actual lan because it's doing dhcp service and that is going to confuse * the machine we're copying from is loaclhost * we could do some kind of port forwarding thing? maybe a port forward on run-border-vm qemu user networking ... * static route on loaclhost? 512 sudo ip netns add test-lan 514 sudo ip link set dev enp1s0 netns test-lan 525 sudo ip link add veth-test-lan type veth peer veth1 netns test-lan 533 sudo ip netns exec test-lan ip link add name br0 type bridge 536 sudo ip netns exec test-lan ip link set veth1 master br0 537 sudo ip netns exec test-lan ip link set enp1s0 master br0 sudo ip netns exec test-lan /nix/store/dh66q9k402pwpmmgc983xwmwb3vvvjbr-busybox-1.36.1/bin/busybox udhcpc -i br0 then we could add a route to 10.8.0.1/32 with dev veth-test-lan ? Sat Jan 6 20:52:45 GMT 2024 This is all beside the point right now because the _recovery_ system does not run all this stuff - it just has a dhcp client on the lan interface. We could plug it straight into the switch. As we already just plugged it into enp1s0 on loaclhost, could we do somethin to put it on the lan from there? add it to vbridge0? Sun Jan 7 15:30:57 GMT 2024 Turns out we should have used a working ethernet cable. Sun Jan 7 15:31:14 GMT 2024 OK, so # on device mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /mnt [ take a snapshot if needed ] [ clear out the turrisos files ] ls /mnt/@ # on build $ nix-build -I liminix-config=./examples/rotuer.nix --arg device "import ./devices/turris-omnia" -A outputs.systemConfiguration $ nix-shell --run "min-copy-closure -r /mnt/@ root@recovery.lan result " # on device $ mkdir /mnt/@/persist $ /mnt/@/nix/store/swf3vn9bzx198c0cwp6naq0glqa9192n-make-stuff-armv7l-unknown-linux-musleabihf/bin/install /mnt/@/ this fails because it tries to copy from the unprefixed nix store. Also probably it should mkdir $prefix/persist. Also it needs to create $prefix/boot: it's too late to do that with `activate` because u-boot will need it to exist in order to load the initramfs that runs activate Thu Jan 11 23:36:47 GMT 2024 squashfs rootfsType doesn't rebuild when the kernel config is changed Mon Jan 22 19:04:45 GMT 2024 setenv serverip 10.0.0.1 setenv ipaddr 10.0.0.8 compraddr=0x01000000 tftpboot ${compraddr} recovery.img.lzma setexpr writeaddr ${filesize} + $compraddr lzmadec ${compraddr} $writeaddr usb start usb dev 0 wdt dev watchdog@20300 wdt stop usb write ${writeaddr} 0 ${filesize} Thu Jan 25 11:55:36 GMT 2024 openwrt: CONFIG_BROADCOM_PHY=m CONFIG_FIXED_PHY=y CONFIG_GENERIC_PHY=y CONFIG_IP17XX_PHY=m ? CONFIG_MARVELL_PHY=y CONFIG_MVSW61XX_PHY=y ? CONFIG_RTL8366RB_PHY=m ? CONFIG_RTL8366S_PHY=m ? CONFIG_RTL8367B_PHY=m ? CONFIG_SWPHY=y CONFIG_USB_PHY=y CONFIG_FIXED_PHY=y CONFIG_GENERIC_PHY=y CONFIG_MARVELL_PHY=y CONFIG_PHY_MVEBU_A3700_COMPHY=y CONFIG_PHY_MVEBU_A38X_COMPHY=y CONFIG_SWPHY=y # Sat Jan 27 18:14:13 GMT 2024 To make the recovery system (and tftpboot generally) more useful, it would be good to resize the root fs on boot. Need to do this before anything that writes to it Mon Jan 29 21:50:59 GMT 2024 something is corrupted in the uncompressed rootfs $ head -c $(printf "%d" 0x2be0000) rootfs | sha1sum 142571fe0436c18191727d1d4c2fd32163c1f2e1 - => sha1sum 0x1000000 2be0000 sha1 for 01000000 ... 03bdffff ==> 142571fe0436c18191727d1d4c2fd32163c1f2e1 but! $ head -c $(printf "%d" 0x2bf0000) rootfs | sha1sum 7aa004ba87c6772bade491fbade164e2dfe100f9 - => sha1sum 0x1000000 2bf0000 sha1 for 01000000 ... 03beffff ==> 1a0923a94784d0c0b86006c5e6fff1649770dad3 something is trashing something in the range 03be0000 - 03beffff or else it's not being decompressed properly pxefile_addr_r=0x1900000 ramdisk_addr_r=0x2200000 scriptaddr=0x1800000 fdt_addr_r=0x2000000 fdtcontroladdr=7fb19b30 fdtfile=armada-385-turris-omnia.dtb fdt_high=0x10000000 initrd_high=0x10000000 kernel_addr_r=0x1000000 0x1700000; 0x10000000 Sun Feb 4 11:55:00 GMT 2024 restructuredtext headings: https://devguide.python.org/documentation/markup/#sections ####### chapter (one per filename) ******* ======= ------- Mon Feb 5 09:57:52 GMT 2024 Before calling the Omnia "done" I'd like to get it to the point that I can actually use it as a CPE. This means - writing something down about how we handle static addresses - hosts that need static ipv6 can configure it themselves as ::n where n is a small number. this won't clash with slaac - the `hosts` param to dnsmasq can specify static ipv4 - dealing with port forwards and allowed incoming in the firewall - would be quite cool to run sniproxy instead of forwarding to loaclhost (extra credit) Sat Feb 10 18:23:54 GMT 2024 ARGH KERNEL You can't define CONFIG_NETFILTER=y in a monolithic kernel and expect later to separately build some modules that use it, because there are a bunch of symbols that only get defined if certain other CONFIG options are set at the time that the monolithic kernel is built. https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/net/netfilter/core.c#L689 Another example is https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/include/linux/netdevice.h#L160 - if you decide after building the kernel that you're going to build some wireless modules, you can't do that without rebuilding the kernel so that it knows to expect them The moral of the story seems to be: if you have a compiled Linux kernel source tree and you change some symbol from "is not set" to m and then run make modules, you cannot in general expect that newly compiled module to work. AP advertised VHT without HT, disabling HT/VHT/HE TODO - [done] support kernel version as parameter to builder pkgs/kernel/default.nix - [done] extract the change in how module loading works from omnia device config, and fix the other thing that uses it - [axed] wlan module to take 'backported' as a parameter half of the omnia conditionalConfig can go into the module - [done] upgrade omnia to kernel v6 - figure out what mdns we need for local hostname resolution (maybe bridging lan/wlan)? - [DONE] slow wifi because "AP advertised VHT without HT, disabling HT/VHT/HE" - [DONE] add local domain to secrets - run sniproxy instead of forwarding - [test] forward some port to loaclhost 22 for inbound ipv4 ssh Mon Feb 12 21:50:35 GMT 2024 # find /run/service-state/dhcp6c.wan.link.pppoe/address/ /run/service-state/dhcp6c.wan.link.pppoe/address/ /run/service-state/dhcp6c.wan.link.pppoe/address/2001-8b0-1111-1111-0-ffff-51bb-4cf2_LFoo015bSsM /run/service-state/dhcp6c.wan.link.pppoe/address/2001-8b0-1111-1111-0-ffff-51bb-4cf2_LFoo015bSsM/valid /run/service-state/dhcp6c.wan.link.pppoe/address/2001-8b0-1111-1111-0-ffff-51bb-4cf2_LFoo015bSsM/preferred /run/service-state/dhcp6c.wan.link.pppoe/address/2001-8b0-1111-1111-0-ffff-51bb-4cf2_LFoo015bSsM/len /run/service-state/dhcp6c.wan.link.pppoe/address/2001-8b0-1111-1111-0-ffff-51bb-4cf2_LFoo015bSsM/address # valid 7199 preferred 3599 Tue Feb 13 19:44:57 GMT 2024 Before we put this back live, would be good to [done] 1) move the leases file into /persist I think we'll do /persist/service// and change ssh to use the same scheme. we could put mkpersist() in serviceFns which would check for /persist and return a directory in /persist/service/ or /run/service-state (will something bad happen if we use /run/service-state? it will also expose the thingy as an output, but whether it's accessible that way will depend on whether there's a writable fs or not, which is unexpected) : rename service-state to /run/services/outputs : on boot : if /persist : create /persist/services/state and symlink /run/services/state to it : else create /run/services/state [done] 2) maybe change the local domain back to .lan? setting up systemd-networkd with search domains is an awful faff [done] 3) work out what to do with incoming ssh from wan - For noetbook and thinkpad we have a vpn anyway so can expect to reach loaclhost directly using ipv6 - stop ssh from ever trying to get to our ipv4 address. - we could get rid of A record for loaclhost.telent.net but there are a bunch of CNAMES pointing at it for web servers. - we could reject incoming connections to tcp4 port 22 in firewall and then there is a clear signal to Dont Do That Then - for emergency use, dnat ipv4 2200 and 2201 to rotuer and loaclhost Tue Feb 13 22:31:03 GMT 2024 * the reason we can't reboot is that there is a service to add each lan device to the bridge which does ifwait $dev running, which doesn't return until there's something plugged in. So s6-rc hangs indefinitely until the lan switch is fully populated. This is definitely a "next milestone" thing. * another example of "thing that depends on other thing but which it is actually OK if neither of them happen" might be "mount a filesystem if there is a usb mass storage device attached" * I don't know if failover also fits into the model we don't quite have. LTE route depends on pppoe not being healthy we can have services (or bundles) that aren't part of the default target, and plumb them into events of some kind (netlink?) to bring them up/down? we can use s6-rc instanced services: https://skarnet.org/software/s6/instances.html "s6-instance-create and s6-instance-delete are relatively expensive operations, because they have to recursively copy or delete directories and use the synchronization mechanism with the instance supervisor, compared to s6-instance-control which only has to send commands to already existing supervisors. If you are going to turn instances on and off on a regular basis, it is more efficient to keep the instance existing and control it with s6-instance-control than it is to repeatedly create and delete it. " Probably we need something that reads netlink messages and converts them to a format that we can use to control services. Is there a benefit to using services here and not just running commands? it means the system state change we desire will stay changed. TODO items not to lose track of - speed testing (iperf) - make gl-ar750 tftpboot build again - finish belkin - install sniproxy - is there something simple we can do to make it reboot again? - turn rotuer,extneder examples into "profiles" that don't embed hardware specifics Thu Feb 15 11:50:56 GMT 2024 1) to make tftpboot work with old bootm implementations we need - compressed root - uncompressed root - kernel with dtb dtb needs to know where uncompressed rootfs is and how big 2) if the image is a zImage (arm32) or an Image (arm64) we have to stick with the three-arg bootz, and the dtb has to be lower in ram than the kernel Fri Feb 16 15:43:32 GMT 2024 DHCP6c refresh is still wrong. We get updates for an address that hasn't changed prefix or length, when the expiry times have changed, and we can't action that by remove;add because remove will wipe out any routes through the interface but add won't put them back We can use "change" for both adds and changes, but we need to know that a change is not a delete The "identity" of an address is the address itself: kernel won't let you add the same address with two different prefixes. Keeping it simple, we could call "change" on every address in the new-addresses list and "del" on every address in old-addresses that is no longer in new-addresses If the upstream has changed length, "ip addr change" is ignored, so it needs to be in deleted as well as added/changed Fri Feb 16 19:37:08 GMT 2024 [ 3.839775] cfg80211: module verification failed: signature and/or required key missing - tainting kernel [ 4.156952] ath10k_pci 0000:00:00.0: enabling device (0000 -> 0002) [ 4.165756] ath10k_pci 0000:00:00.0: pci irq legacy oper_irq_mode 1 irq_mode 0 reset_mode 0 [ 4.399285] ath10k_pci 0000:00:00.0: qca9887 hw1.0 target 0x4100016d chip_id 0x004000ff sub 0000:0000 [ 4.408906] ath10k_pci 0000:00:00.0: kconfig debug 1 debugfs 0 tracing 0 dfs 0 testmode 0 [ 4.420096] ath10k_pci 0000:00:00.0: firmware ver 10.2.4-1.0-00047 api 5 features no-p2p,ignore-otp,ski p-clock-init,mfp,allows-mesh-bcast crc32 62f7565f [ 4.467443] ath10k_pci 0000:00:00.0: board_file api 1 bmi_id N/A crc32 546cca0d [ 5.472096] ath10k_pci 0000:00:00.0: htt-ver 2.1 wmi-op 5 htt-op 2 cal file max-sta 128 raw 0 hwcrypto [ 5.585796] ath: EEPROM regdomain: 0x0 [ 5.589712] ath: EEPROM indicates default country code should be used [ 5.596364] ath: doing EEPROM country->regdmn map search [ 5.601875] ath: country maps to regdmn code: 0x3a [ 5.606831] ath: Country alpha2 being used: US [ 5.611425] ath: Regpair used: 0x3a [ 6.742365] ath10k_pci 0000:00:00.0: pdev param 0 not supported by firmware [ 6.903389] random: hostapd: uninitialized urandom read (1027 bytes read) [ 8.169901] ath10k_pci 0000:00:00.0: pdev param 0 not supported by firmware [ 14.450193] ath10k_pci 0000:00:00.0: pdev param 0 not supported by firmware [ 15.518682] random: hostapd: uninitialized urandom read (1027 bytes read) [ 16.762697] ath10k_pci 0000:00:00.0: pdev param 0 not supported by firmware [ 23.030622] ath10k_pci 0000:00:00.0: pdev param 0 not supported by firmware [ Tue Feb 27 23:16:27 GMT 2024 We made it a full week with rotuer running internet chez nous and no need for an intervention, so I am happy to call it "production". There are still things that need fixing but they're mostly within scope for a services refresh I have embarked on "profiles" by creating a wap.nix I think we could have a service module for resolvconf It would be good to build a wap.nix example for the belkin and we could start looking at ubifs I've lost a chunk of notes about using events to drive desired service state. There is probably only going to be one udev listener, so what if we have udev as a config key thusly udev.rules = [ { match = { SUBSYSTEM = "rpmsg"; ATTR.name = "DATA5_CNTL"; }; service = longrun { name = "lte-modem"; run = "blah blah blah"; }; } # this one would be provided by the bridge module instead of # adding bridge member services to the default target { match = { SUBSYSTEM="net"; ID_PATH="pci-0000:04:00.0"; ATTR.operstate = "up"; }; service = oneshot { up = "ip link set dev $dev master $(output ${primary} ifname)"; down = "ip link set dev $(output ${member} ifname) nomaster"; } } ] This works for udev/sysfs, but we want a similar architecture(sic) for user-generated target state so we could have services that run on e.g. "is the ppp0 service healthy" or not. Probably there isn't a top-level config key for each service though services.wan = svc.ppoe.build { .... }; services.lte = watcher.build { watching = services.wan; match = { # an expression matching the outputs of the service # to be watched health = "failing"; }; service = oneshot { run = "start_lte_blah"; }; } thing is, we could use this syntax also for sysfs watches, but not vice versa ... but it's not quite the same because here we're doing static matches on contents of files, whereas the udev one is a query expression on the sysfs database. we might need that flexibiity to implement "mount the backup drive no matter _which_ damn sda_n_ device it appears as". I don't know if there's the same need for service outputs - postulate the existence of a collection of services which are all similar enough that some other service can watch them all and do $something when one of the changes state. Or a single service with very complicated outputs. For example, something could watch the snmp database and update service status depending on what it finds. Or something something mqtt... we find that the "match" needs to be interpreted differently according to the thing being watched. perhaps the service being watched needs to provide a "watch me" interface somehow which accepts match criteria and outputs a true/false. Something else then needs to services.addmember = services.udev.watch { match = { SUBSYSTEM = "net"; ID_PATH = "pci-0000:04:00.0"; ATTR.operstate = "up"; }; service = oneshot { up = "ip link set dev $dev master $(output ${primary} ifname)"; down = "ip link set dev $(output ${member} ifname) nomaster"; }; } Sat Mar 2 15:37:29 GMT 2024 Simply put, what I think it boils down to is that we want a service which acts as an actuator or control switch for another service, and will start/stop that controlled service according to some criteria. services.addmember = svc.network.ifwatch.build { interface = config.hardware.networkInterfaces.lan1; # this should be part of the definition not the params service = oneshot { name = "member-${bridge}-${interface}"; up = "ip link set dev $dev master $(output ${primary} ifname)"; down = "ip link set dev $(output ${member} ifname) nomaster"; }; } we could start by writing this. we need to adapt ifwait Sun Mar 3 17:09:21 GMT 2024 this is annoyingly hard to test. the tests we'd like to write are 1) when it gets events that don't match the requirement, nothing happens 2) when it gets an event that should start the service, the service starts 3) when stop should stop 4) when start and already started, nothing happens 5) when stop and already stopped, nothing happens what do we do if service fails to start? s6-rc will eventually reset it to "down", I think: do we need to take action? Mon Mar 4 20:46:55 GMT 2024 # relevant but not correct for this model: https://www.forked.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=3490 # power on port 5 snmpset -v 1 -c private 192.168.5.14 .1.3.6.1.4.1.318.1.1.4.4.2.1.3.5 integer 1 # power off port 5 snmpset -v 1 -c private 192.168.5.14 .1.3.6.1.4.1.318.1.1.4.4.2.1.3.5 integer 2 # toggle off/on port 5 snmpset -v 1 -c private 192.168.5.14 .1.3.6.1.4.1.318.1.1.4.4.2.1.3.5 integer 3 Wed Mar 6 18:24:29 GMT 2024 What happens when we attempt to start the service but it fails? We assume the start was successful so we won't try and restart it again next time we get an event that should cause it to start. Thu Mar 7 11:48:26 GMT 2024 what next? - fennel script needs to know where s6-rc is - some nix syntax - update bridge module members.nix to use the new thing I can't find a ci derivation that uses the bridge. Mon Mar 11 20:31:45 GMT 2024 Create a qemu config where wan and lan devices are bridged into a single bridge start qemu paused Use qemu monitor commands to no-carrier the network devices set_link virtio-net-pci.1 off set_link virtio-net-pci.0 off Boot the system See if both devices are bridge members See if reboot is possible Use qemu monitor commands to enable the network devices set_link virtio-net-pci.1 on set_link virtio-net-pci.0 on See if both devices are bridge members disable again,check if back to starting position Wed Mar 13 00:00:16 GMT 2024 aside: "trigger" is the least bad word I've thought of so far for these services that stop/start other services telent: yeah, in general 'ps afuxww' (or s6-ps -H :)) is the way to solve this, look for hung s6-rc processes and in particular their s6-svlisten1 children, where the command line will show what service is still waiting for readiness Wed Mar 20 19:34:36 GMT 2024 Because I forgot hoe to rebuild rotuer, I tihnk it is time to improve support for out-of-tree configurations. So I've made modules/profiles/gateway.nix and now I can copy rotuer.nix to telent-nixos-config. Probably I should make nix-build work on the top-level derivation and install liminix-rebuild as a binary? would be good if an out-of-tree config could specify the device it was targeting? Fri Mar 22 20:49:54 GMT 2024 Ideally liminix-rebuild could accept a configuration file that specifies a liminix-config file, a target hostname (maybe plus ssh port, credentials etc) and the device name. Not going to work on that just now but it does mean we can punt on specifying the device inside the liminix-config which is unreasonably circular. Maybe we'll just chuck a makefile in telent-nixos-config Fri Mar 22 22:14:32 GMT 2024 For the service failover milestone we said a. A configuration demonstrating a service which is restarted when it crashes b. A failover config where service B runs iff service A is unavailable c. A config showing different pppd behaviour when interface is flakey (retry) vs ppp password is wrong (report error, wait for resolution) Sun Mar 24 23:41:27 GMT 2024 TODO 1) make liminix-rebuild bounce only affected services instead of full reboot (what does it do about triggered services?) 2) sniproxy 3) see if arhcive still works. usb disk hotplug would be a good candidate for switching to triggers Mon Mar 25 19:35:47 GMT 2024 to make the liminix-rebuild thing restart only affected services, it needs to know when the new service is not like the old one. By default it does not restart a service with a changed up/down/run script unless the name has also changed, so we need to figure out how to generate a "conversion" file with the services that are different pkgs/s6-rc-database/default.nix creates $out/compiled, we could add $out/hashes to this the other thing making this fun is that we will need to run `activate` (which is usually done in preinit) otherwise the new configuration's fhs directories won't exist. so the plan woyuld be in liminix-rebuild, when reboot was not chosen, - run activate - compare /run/s6-rc/compiled/hashes (old services) with /etc/s6-rc/compiled/hashes (new services) - whenever both files have the same column 1 and different column 2, add that name to restart list (need to turn restarts.fnl into a lua script) s6-rc-update /etc/s6-rc/compiled/hashes restarts Tue Mar 26 23:18:53 GMT 2024 activate overwrites /etc/s6-rc/compiled, which is a problem because s6-rc-update expects to find the old compiled database here so that it can know what to update Maybe config.filesystem should specify /etc/s6-rc/compiled.new and something in early boot could symlink /etc/s6-rc/compiled to it Sat Mar 30 18:41:14 GMT 2024 soft restart doesn't restart services that are invoked by trigger, because it has to do -p -u default so that it prunes services that were in the old config but not the new one. Ideally we need somehow to notify the trigger that it should respawn its service. Maybe we could add triggers to the force restart list, if there's a way to detect which they are? don't want to do it by adding files in the service state directory if there may be oneshot triggers. Can there be oneshot triggers? The hashes file is built when we build the service database, so we could easily(?) add something in there to mark services that need poking whenever there's a restart. It's not perfect because the triggered services will be bounced unnecessarily, but remember that the alternative is a reboot ... Mon Apr 1 00:18:50 BST 2024 i) I don't know if digressing into remote log shipping is a tangent or an important part of making services work well. ii) Should there be a single "machine state" value for all of the trigger services to reference, or is it better that each trigger service has its own private state, or (third option) one state per "state source"? We previously handwaved that a state source is a service services.addmember = services.udev.watch { match = { SUBSYSTEM = "net"; ID_PATH = "pci-0000:04:00.0"; ATTR.operstate = "up"; }; service = oneshot { up = "ip link set dev $dev master $(output ${primary} ifname)"; down = "ip link set dev $(output ${member} ifname) nomaster"; }; } Tue Apr 2 19:55:25 BST 2024 We could do a test script for udev usb disk mounting, which uses the qemu monitor to add/remove a disk. ./result/run.sh --flag -device --flag usb-ehci,id=xhci --flag -drive --flag if=none,id=usbstick,format=raw,file=./stick.img (qemu) device_add usb-storage,bus=xhci.0,drive=usbstick Fri Apr 5 17:11:46 BST 2024 1) write a fennel thing that reads from the udev rebroadcast socket 2) and can check sysfs for state 3) set up mdevd in liminix Sat Apr 6 13:23:02 BST 2024 I wonder if we could replace preinit with an execline script? One for the TODO stack Sun Apr 7 14:03:29 BST 2024 1) we want to know what messages are sent from mdevd under various circumstances - actually, right now the only relevant circumstances are updown and inout 2) we might get a wider variety of messages from real hardware? 3) if we log the raw messages, pref. with timestamps, then we can write tests for the parsing therefore: write a program that opens the netlink socket and logs all data received ---- what's the minimum we need here? we need the inout test to open a uevent socket and use uevents to update some state that says whether the backup drive is plugged in rather awkwardly, uevents don't have filesystem labels. so we also need to run blkid to find the label of each partition, and ideally we do this while the partition is present, not each time we get an event for it. We have DEVNAME, DEVTYPE, SUBSYSTEM to indicate that a filesystem of interest may be present, we should use that as a trigger to scan any known add@/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:13.0/usb1/1-1/1-1:1.0/host0/target0:0:0/0:0:0:0/block/sda/sda1 ACTION=add DEVPATH=/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:13.0/usb1/1-1/1-1:1.0/host0/target0:0:0/0:0:0:0/block/sda/sda1 SUBSYSTEM=block MAJOR=8 MINOR=1 DEVNAME=sda1 DEVTYPE=partition DISKSEQ=2 PARTN=1 SEQNUM=1528 Some disks on loaclhost and noetbook have PARTNAME field - I assume this is because they're GPT disks. Would it actually be better to use this field than grovelling for filesystem label? Tue Apr 9 21:07:50 BST 2024 Having waited for the appropriately labelled disk to appear, we then also have to communicate its path to the service that mounts it - create a symlink - or use an instanced service Creating a symlink will be fine if we can pass the symlink name as a param to fswait Wed Apr 10 20:53:48 BST 2024 We think that fswait will evolve into a more general waiting-for-uevents tool. Maybe we could provide the matchers on the command line: waituevent -l /dev/volumes/backup-disk -s mount-srv devtype=partition partname=backup-disk Thu Apr 11 23:09:43 BST 2024 lcommit d3a2e3a4cb80b631df2ab79d463c2c4d1adef37b commit 4a58cf9335116ce673fcf08f70f3bca921a4c9ad commit afca6d4b63dd39062f02827b3c29e16904770216 Sun Apr 14 19:50:27 BST 2024 how to get this on to main: - make uevent-watcher package (it's fswait renamed) - make mount service use it - module for mdevd - add nellie (generalise for other netlink uses w/params pid/family/groups) Mon Apr 15 19:59:43 BST 2024 plan: introduce uevent-watcher command, update test to use it make mount service use it Tue Apr 16 18:59:25 BST 2024 Another idea for maybe-not-now: tftp local/peer addresses could be provided as top-level params (e.g. to nix-build). Wed Apr 17 18:57:49 BST 2024 I hatched a plan (and forgot to save this file) to build a service that subscribes to uevents and retains state so that other services can know about things that happened before they started. I'm wondering if it's really needed though, because there could be one process to read the socket and start/stop *all* the udev triggered services. Not sure how we'd describe this in nix though: how do all the other services How we would do a uevent database service (sysfsq): for each event e from socket if e.action in (add, change) path[e.path] = e.attribues if e.action == 'remove' path.remove e.path (update-indices e) (fn update-indices [event] for each k in (keys event) index.k.v += e) we also want to not maintain indexes when there are so many values in the index entry to make searching it worthless. to retrieve, look at each criterion that has an index and choose the index with fewest elements in the value. scan that index for the other criteria there are 813 uevent files in sysfs on arhcive, is this all overkill? maybe we could simplify using a hardcoded stopword list - e.g. don't have indices for MAJOR, MINOR what are we going to use for querying? can't be netlink because that's a shared medium (broadcast/multicast). unix dgram socket? alternative would be to somehow use the filesystem as a database Wed Apr 17 22:00:29 BST 2024 tests. assuming the sysfs setup from all-events.txt, we can write tests lik - there is a path for $foo - the attributes are x, y, z - when I add a device with $attributes, I can recall it - by path - by attribute value - when I remove it again, I cannot access it by path or attributes - when I add a device with $attributes major minor foo bar baz it is added to indices for foo bar baz but not major minor - when I remove it, it can no longer be found by looking in any index - when I query with multiple attributes, the search is performed using the most specific attribute (= the attribute whose value at this key has fewest elements) I am still looking for ways to avoid doing this, but it is potentially the first of several "database" services that triggers could want to use so maybe it's an emerging pattern. https://github.com/philanc/minisock useful? we could almost replace nellie with it only not quite (it hardcodes 0 as the "protocol" param to socket()) Fri Apr 19 20:55:22 BST 2024 We could have a service that's present only when a devdb entry is present. For example mount_disk only runs when partlabel=foo Or we could have a service that continues to run as the $somedatabase service state changes and does different things depending on the nature of those changes. For example, [I can't think of an example now, but it was definitely an issue the other day, maybe I dreamt it] I don't think this will be such an issue for devdb becuase there isn't much in it that has continuously varying values. Maybe battery health is the exception there The step ahead we're thinking here is: how do clients do a request? A single one-of request for state is fine but chances are that a client will do that to get initial state and then need to open a netlink socket to get updates: well, if we can feed them the initial state filtered for their needs why can't we send them the relevant updates as well? This makes the database server design a bit more complicated as it needs to remember each client and their subscriptions, and then send only relevant updates to each subscribed client * should a client be allowed multiple subscriptions on the same connection? * do we guarantee that every message sent is matching the subscription or can we send other stuff as well if it makes implementation easier? it might defeat the purpose a bit because it means the client also needs to filter, but the client will anyway have to do some message parsing so they can distinguish add from remove * where do we start? Sun Apr 21 13:31:48 BST 2024 We have the mechanics of it working (albeit implemented in the simplest possible terms), we need to glue it to some I/O 1) open a netlink socket and read the events from it 2) "create a PF_UNIX socket of type SOCK_STREAM, and accept connections on it, then each time you accept a connection, you get a new fd" - accept connection - read terms from it - register callback that writes event to connected socket minisock has no support for "test if fd is ready" or "wait for [fds] to become ready", either we need poll() or we could add a call for "is this fd ready to read" and use coroutines. Fork minisock or add as another library? [ if we fork minisock we could expose the protocol param to Lua so we could use it for netlink ] Tue Apr 23 19:13:45 BST 2024 we could convert from minisock to lualinux. if we can also use that to get rid of nellie and/or lfs, the size tradeoff is minimal --- Is there some way we could test the devout event loop? I can register a fd with a callback when the fd is ready, my callback is called when the callback return true it remains registered when the callback return true it is unregistered and the fd is closed loop.register loop.registered? loop.feed Tue Apr 23 20:34:03 BST 2024 I think we could make the event loop abstraction leak less? It's not actually a _loop_, all the actual GOTO 10 happens outside of it [X] 1) see if we can do netlink in lualinux [X] 2) if so, convert it to lualinux [X] 3) add netlink socket to event loop [X] 4) make it send messages to subscribers 5) package it 6) make uevent-watcher use it instead of netlink directly 7) write an inout test variant that has the stick inserted at boot time already I'm also thinking we could wrap the raw fds from lualinux into small objects with read and close methods? It would make testing easier if nothing else - also use of with-open. Maybe do that in anoia.