[SOLVED] Load Save file on SD card MMC drive at live CD boot

[luc0zade]

I'm running x86_64 -bit Porteus v1.2rc1 (XFCE edition) from a live CD on a Dell Latitude E5420 laptop.

The problem is that when I boot from the live CD, it doesn't find the save.dat file I have set up on a MMC drive, i.e. SD card.

I think the save changes file is alright - at least I can see it on the SD card, but it just isn't loading during boot.

The 8GB SD card which I'm using as a FAT32 formatted MMC drive appears as a device at /dev/mmcblk0p1 and when mounted, it appears at /media/1D99-5097. The save file is visible at /media/1D99-5097/save-v01.dat. It is 1024 MB in size - is this too big?

Firstly, can I check that I'm using the correct cheat code at start up?

I can see there are different ways to do this, but I have entered:-

Code: Select all

changes=/dev/mmcblk0p1/save-v01.dat

My guess is the problem is caused by the SD card being slow to initialize as a MMC drive.

Because I thought the speed of the SD card might be an issue, I'm using a 'class 10' SD card which the manufacturer claims to have a read speed of up to 30 MB/s. I tried a read test using the Palimpest Disk Utility, which gave an average read speed of 17.9 MB/s, however this might because the Linux driver for the O2 Micro 8321 SD Host controller built into the laptop needs further optimisation. Either way it's half the speed of USB 2.0 at best.

I've tried adding the delay cheatcode to the boot command, but even with the delay parameter set to 180 seconds, the save.dat file on the MMC drive is still not found. Does the delay need to be long enough for the entire 1GB save file to be read into memory? How long would this take?

[fanthom]

Welcome on board luc0zade,

probably support for your mmc controller was not compiled directly into kernel.
please boot Porteus from CD -> insert mmc card into controller -> mount it somewhere -> show me output of 'lsmod | head -n20' command
this info will tell me which drivers must be added to the vmlinuz.

Thanks

[luc0zade]

Hi fanthom,

Thanks for your reply.

With the MMC SD card mounted at /media/1D99-5097 the output of lsmod | head -n20 is: -

Code: Select all

Module                  Size  Used by
cryptd                  4982  0 
crypto_hash             8316  1 cryptd
crypto_wq                704  1 cryptd
crypto_blkcipher        9683  1 cryptd
aes_x86_64              7087  2 
aes_generic            25681  1 aes_x86_64
ipv6                  189797  40 
snd_seq_dummy           1120  0 
snd_seq_oss            22499  0 
snd_seq_midi_event      3975  1 snd_seq_oss
snd_seq                38187  5 snd_seq_dummy,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq_midi_event
snd_seq_device          3941  3 snd_seq_dummy,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq
snd_pcm_oss            26801  0 
snd_mixer_oss          11001  1 snd_pcm_oss
mousedev                7984  0 
snd_hda_codec_hdmi     19510  1 
snd_hda_codec_idt      43048  1 
i915                  298108  2 
cryptomgr               1961  0 

Sorry I couldn't work out how to put this output into monospaced font.

Anyway, I hope this helps!

[fanthom]

hmmm - unfortunately i cant see any new drivers being loaded...

once again - please mount your card and show me output of following commands:
a) lspci -knn
b) lsmod
c) content /var/log/messages file

please upload these to pastebin.com (can be in one large file) and link here for review.
please do it as soon as you can cause tomorrow i'm going on 10 days holiday and wont have much time to work on Porteus.

Cheers

[luc0zade]

Hi, sorry not reply sooner but the website seemed to go down just as I was about to post this morning.

The requested output is on PasteBin at: http://pastebin.com/dBCfq6gg

Thanks for your help and have a good holiday - don't worry if you haven't got the time to fix this before you go.

[fanthom]

hi luc0zade,

this info was really helpful. i have prepared linux-3.3.1 updated based on new kernel config where MMC and MS drivers are compiled in.
please try it and let me know if that resolved your issue:
http://porteus.org/forum/viewtopic.php? ... 8834#p8834

if case of fail please boot with new kernel and use 'debug' cheatcode. on first stop please run 'blkid' command and check if /dev/mmcblk0p1 is listed. if not then please run 'blkid /dev/mmcblk0p1' and check if filesystem on mmc card was recognized properly.

good luck!

[luc0zade]

Hi fanthom,

Good news.. I've prepared a couple of ISOs with the new vmlinuz which includes the MMC / SD & MS kernel drivers and the boot process is now finding the session persistence save file on the SD card MMC drive. For the record, I'm booting using the cheat code changes=/mnt/mmcblk0p1/save-v03.dat delay=10 . Of course /mnt/mmcblk0p1 is the location of the mounted SD card MMC drive and save-v03.dat is the name of the save file. I probably don't need delay=10 now but I've left it in for the time being.

I'll do some more testing with my current remastered Porteus-XFCE-v1.2-rc1-x86_64 ISO now including both kernel 3.3.1 and XFCE 4.9 - but it looks like the MMC drive boot problem is fixed!

Thanks for resolving this issue so quickly.