Debian support for HP mv2120: putting everything together

<p>

I managed to get my hands on a HP Media Vault mv2120, a nice ARM based NAS
device, a few months ago with the intentions of porting Debian to it.
Unfortunately, I have been really busy lately and most of my time was spent
on adding support for the QNAP TS-109/TS-209 and TS-409 (which required a
lot of generic work to get Marvell Orion support into Debian, a new SoC
used in many NAS devices, including the QNAP TS-x09 and HP mv2120).

</p>

<p>

There were a number of things that had to be worked out before Debian would
run on the mv2120.  The good news is that Marc Singer and Eugene San have
done all of the heavy lifting in the last few weeks in figuring out how the
mv2120 works and that now it's just a matter of putting everything together
for Debian to work.

</p>

<p>

Here are the issues that had to be worked out:

</p>

<ul>

<li>Figure out how the rescue mode works and how to construct a rescue
image that the device can boot: I knew that the mv2120 had a rescue mode
that can be activated by keeping the the power and reset buttons pressed
when starting that would request a rescue image via the network.  This
rescue mode can be used to start the Debian installer.  Eugene San figured
out how to construct a rescue image that the mv2120 would accept.  Marc
Singer has also written a tool, uphpmvault, to serve such rescue images
from Linux.</li>

<li>Figure out the best way to make one image that contains the kernel and
ramdisk: the mv2120 only loads a kernel and no ramdisk, but a ramdisk is
needed to start Debian.  I discussed some really ugly hacks with Marc
Singer to get the mv2120 to accept an image consisting of kernel and
ramdisk but Marc wanted to try something else first.  u-boot, the boot
loader used on the mv2120, can accept something called a multipart image
which can consist of a kernel and a ramdisk.  When Eugene San heard that we
were trying to load a multipart image, he went ahead and figured out how to
construct an image that the mv2120 would boot.</li>

</ul>

<p>

Now that these two issues are resolved, I simply need to put everything
together and add support for the mv2120 to a number of debian-installer
components.  We already have Orion kernel images in unstable that support
the HP mv2120 (along with a number of other Orion based NAS devices) and
the rest shouldn't take too long.

</p>

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