Bullseye on the QNAP TS-220

[Timo Jyrinki]

I have recently upgraded to bullseye on my TS-220, and ran into the

...

I have now managed to install the bullseye kernel into the otherwise
unused (?) "RootFS2" partition (3MB), so I thought I'd report on the
steps I went through, in case it might be helpful to someone else.

Thank you, I was wondering if anyone's upgraded these Kirkwoods to
bullseye and I guess the answer is "no, not successfully" unless going
your route.

The instructions look good and if one day I have time to dig up my
serial cable from somewhere and have plenty of extra time, I'll try it.
It seems my QNAP TS-221 just keeps on going so there's a "risk" I'll
want to use it past buster's support period.

For testing purposes, I then manually created a uImage of the buster
kernel

You don't happen to have the mkimage line handy? Maybe there's nothing
special about it but it wouldn't hurt to have a reference in this
thread. OTOH, testing booting from it via serial cable is of course safe.

    $ uname -r
    5.10.0-8-marvell

\o/

-Timo

[Christian Henz]

Post by Timo Jyrinki
You don't happen to have the mkimage line handy? Maybe there's nothing
special about it but it wouldn't hurt to have a reference in this
thread. OTOH, testing booting from it via serial cable is of course safe.

I used something like this (pieced together from
/usr/share/flash-kernel/functions):

kver=4.19.0-17-marvell
cat /boot/vmlinuz-$kver /boot/dtb-$kver > uImage-$kver.in
mkimage -A arm -O linux -T kernel -C none -a 0x00008000 -e 0x00008000 -n
"kernel $kver" -d uImage-$kver.in uImage-$kver

Cheers,
Christian

[Martin Michlmayr]

I have recently upgraded to bullseye on my TS-220, and ran into the
problem with the kernel no longer fitting into the allocated flash

...

Thanks for your detailed write-up. I'm sure this will be useful to
other users!

BTW, Karsten Sperling took another approach and changed the u-boot
config to change the MTD partition layout. Apparently there were
some problems, but if someone can make this work, I think it's a more
elegant approach:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-arm/2021/01/msg00022.html

[Martin Michlmayr]

Post by Martin Michlmayr
BTW, Karsten Sperling took another approach and changed the u-boot
config to change the MTD partition layout.

Arnaud Mouiche has taken a similar approach and has written a script
that will automatically configure QNAP devices.

I think that's the best approach for those who want to run bullseye on
their QNAP.

The script can be found here:
https://github.com/amouiche/qnap_mtd_resize_for_bullseye

If someone uses this script, please post your feedback here.

[Timo Jyrinki]

Post by Martin Michlmayr

Post by Martin Michlmayr
BTW, Karsten Sperling took another approach and changed the u-boot
config to change the MTD partition layout.

Arnaud Mouiche has taken a similar approach and has written a script
that will automatically configure QNAP devices.
I think that's the best approach for those who want to run bullseye on
their QNAP.
https://github.com/amouiche/qnap_mtd_resize_for_bullseye
If someone uses this script, please post your feedback here.

I thought I answered this thread earlier but don't find myself doing so.

Indeed that script worked without a hitch and I've been running Debian
11 on QNAP TS-221 for something like 1.5 years now with zero problems.

-Timo