Conceptronic CH3SNAS and the D-Link DNS-323 revision B1
Conceptronic kindly sent me a CH3SNAS for my Debian porting efforts. The Conceptronic CH3SNAS is reported to be basically the same hardware as the D-Link DNS-323 but it costs slightly less. There were some reports that the CH3SNAS uses a 88F5182 chip whereas the D-Link DNS-323 uses a 88F5181 but nobody was able to confirm this for sure. As it turns out, there are two revisions of the DNS-323. Revision A1 uses a 88F5181 chip along with a separate SATA chip. Revision B2 on the other hand uses a 88F5182 which integrates SATA into the SoC itself. The CH3SNAS is equivalent to a D-Link DNS-323 revision B1. In fact, the mainboard of the CH3SNAS even says DNS-323 rev B1.
The Linux kernel from mainline only works on the DNS-323 revision A1 at the moment. Adding support for revision B1 should be trivial since you basically just need to initialize the SATA chip on the SoC and possibly adapt some other values. Unfortunately, the DNS-323 uses a very small serial connector so none of my serial cables work. If I can find someone who will make a serial cable for me, I'll fix up the kernel.
TODO list for Debian on D-Link DNS-323
Someone asked me the other day what it would take to add Debian support for the D-Link DNS-323. Since we support a number of Orion based devices in debian-installer already, adding support for another device is typically fairly easy. I don't have a D-Link DNS-323 myself, but I looked around the useful DNS-323 wiki and this is what I came up. I'm sharing this list in the hope that other people are interested in working on DNS-323 support.
- The Orion kernel in Debian has support for the D-Link DNS-323 but it needs testing. Also, some patches, such as support for the fan speed chip, are not included in the mainline kernel yet.
- flash-kernel (which writes the kernel and ramdisk to flash) needs support for the DNS-323. I actually implemented this in the meantime but it's completely untested.
- oldsys-preseed reads the network configuration from your existing firmware and uses it to configure the network for debian-installer. This also needs support for the DNS-323.
- Some tools to generate proper firmware images need to be packaged for Debian.
- The debian-installer needs to generate a boot image for the DNS-323 (easy once the tools are packaged).
- Apparently the MAC address is not set automatically in u-boot and you have to run a tool called mac_read to set it. This is problematic because at the moment there's no code to set the MAC address in d-i and to make sure the newly installed system will automatically set the MAC address. This needs some work.