ATA Over Ethernet (AOE)

[CentralWare]

Hello all!

I have a pet project which I think TC would work out terrifically but after reviewing the TC repo, I'm now not sure what I'm going to be up against.

1) Is AoE still being compiled into the kernel and if so, is it also being done within the ARM kernel as well?
2) Vblade (.tcz) seems to have been lost in the past.  The last sighting is in TC 4.x; can someone see about testing x86 and possibly cross-compiling for ARM7?

I have a set of Buffalo LinkStation NAS machines (LS-Pro 2 and 4 bay); what I'm thinking of doing is building a custom image (based off TC) to act as a general DHCP/DNS/TFTP server (dnsmasq), file server (samba) and storage server (AoE+Vblade).

[bmarkus]

Regarding ARM and ARM7 are you referring to Raspberry Pi family?

[CentralWare]

Bela,

Yes and no.  The hardware I'm working with (Linkstation) is in hopes of being setting up as the AoE "server" which are not RasPi, but quite close in nature.

Code: [Select]

Linux NASx2 3.3.4 #1 Thu Sep 17 22:55:58 JST 2015 armv7l GNU/Linux

The "client" machines will likely be RasPi 2B and lower-end Atom motherboards along with a few (intentional) troublesome IBM based Cisco boards.

Thus far, the TC RasPi repo has been invaluable in testing different software (such as dnsmasq, apache and others) but my next step is to see whether or not I can replace the kernel/image with TC.  It looks promising, but I'll have to embed SSH before doing so considering these are headless devices.

[bmarkus]

The aoe kernel module is part of TC base in both x86 and Raspberry Pi releases since a long time, you do not need to install any extra extensions. There is also an aoe boot option to initialize AOE subsystem during boot. I have never used it and don't remember any Forum post on AOE. If you try it in TC/piCore share you experience

I will try to build aoetools from http://aoetools.sourceforge.net/

[gerald_clark]

There is some documentation in the wiki.
http://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/wiki:netbooting

The network storage methods work without PXE also.

[bmarkus]

aoetools.tcz, cec.tcz and vblade.tcz added to 6.x x86 and piCore 7.x armv6/armv7 repos. Please note they are not tested just built. Feeadback appreciated.

[CentralWare]

Bela...  Thank you for your efforts!
I'm preparing and formatting my guinea-pig ARM7 box right now (dual 1TB drives, GBe, etc.) and will be setting up a few "Pies" over the weekend for the test bench once the power supply is built.

NOTE: The linkstation's image does a scatter install considering their love for RAID-Everything for extra redundancy, but if all bodes well, it'll be the first TCLinkstation experiment I'm aware of   I still have to get specs for internal hardware to ensure driver support and such, but as soon as I have answers, I'll post them here.  If my theory is correct, there's a kernel swap that takes place during bootstrap...  that might be the only real challenge to circumvent.

Thanks again and take care!