Recovery System¶

The recovery system is a built-in ramdisk on the SPI-NAND containing useful tools for writing operating system images to SSD's, chroot'ing into a existing install or to update low level firmware. As the name might suggest, it's purpose is similar to the recovery feature on Android phones.

The recovery system is based on OpenWrt, you can customize it for your own needs - e.g to perform automated image download.

You can also run the recovery image from other media sources such as USB or TFTP.

Entering Recovery¶

There should be a recovery option in the bootmenu, otherwise, you can run:

run bootcmd_recovery

in U-Boot.

The recovery command is:

mtd read recovery $load_addr && sf read 0x80100000 0x580000 0x40000 && fsl_mc apply DPL 0x80100000 && bootm $load_addr#ten64

To run recovery from a different source, e.g TFTP, you can replace the mtd read command with:

tftpboot $load_addr recovery.itb

Networking in recovery¶

By default, recovery will act as a DHCP server on 'eth0' on 192.168.10.1

To set up a DHCP WAN connection quickly, you can run set-wan ethX, for example:

set-wan eth7
Bringing up eth7 as wan:
eth7      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:0A:FA:24:24:16
          inet addr:192.168.0.117  Bcast:192.168.0.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::20a:faff:fe24:2416/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:68 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:56 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:7330 (7.1 KiB)  TX bytes:6513 (6.3 KiB)

Recovery Toolset¶

This is a partial list:

Export a local disk over the network via nbd or iSCSI
- nbd-server
- tgtd
Manipulate and/or copy images (qcow2 etc.)
- write-image-disk will use qemu-nbd and qemu-img to do fast copies from image to disk
Partitioning
- parted
- cfdisk
- sfdisk
LVM2 tools
- {pv,vg,lv}create, display,etc
SSD maintenance
- blkdiscard
- fstrim
Filesystem operations
- mkfs.{ext2,ext3,ext4}
- resize2fs
Manipulate flash devices
- mtd
- ubifs {ubiattach,ubiblock,ubidetech,ubiformat,ubimkvol,ubinfo etc.}
Network
- curl with TLS certificates
Other general tools
- dd
- chroot

Setting real time clock¶

As noted in Quickstart, the real time clock will only keep time offline for 48-72 hours, this means the board will likely have no time when you first receive it.

You can set the hardware RTC by:

# This will use the NTP servers defined in OpenWrt's UCI (usually x.openwrt.pool.ntp.org)
ntpd -q -n -p $(uci get system.ntp.server | awk '{print $1}')
# Set RTC time from system time
hwclock -w

You can check the real time clock status with:

hwclock
2020-07-29 06:19:39.394470+00:00

Appliance Store¶

Using the bare metal appliance store you can download and write operating system images directly on the device without having to use any external media - all that is needed is an internet connection.

Appliance store commands:

appstore-list
baremetal-deploy <appliance-id> </dev/_target_block_device_>

Example - downloading and writing a image to NVMe¶

# Download the image
root@recovery000afa242417:/tmp# curl https://archive.traverse.com.au/pub/traverse/ls1088firmware/distribution-images/debian/latest/debian.qcow2 -O
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100  192M  100  192M    0     0  9344k      0  0:00:21  0:00:21 --:--:-- 11.0M

root@recovery000afa242417:/tmp# write-image-disk debian.qcow2 /dev/nvme0n1
About to write debian.qcow2 to /dev/nvme0n1

If you have not already, make sure you have unmounted all partitions and other
services such as LVM2 on /dev/nvme0n1
Starting in 10 seconds, hit Ctrl-C now to abort
[  562.432082]  nbd0: p1 p2 p3
388800+0 records in
388800+0 records out
15925[  574.647591] block nbd0: NBD_DISCONNECT
24800 bytes (1.6[  574.652189] block nbd0: Disconnected due to user request.
 GB, 1.5 GiB) co[  574.658947] block nbd0: shutting down sockets
pied, 12.2091 s, 130 MB/s
/dev/nbd0 disconnected
Warning: Not all of the space available to /dev/nvme0n1 appears to be used, you can fix the GPT to use all of the space (an extra 246959280 blocks) or continue with the current setting?
/dev/nvme0n1 written

# You can now reboot into your system
/sbin/reboot

Updating the recovery image¶

Recovery images can be updated using mtd erase recovery && mtd write <file> recovery

root@OpenWrt:/tmp# mtd erase recovery
Unlocking recovery ...
Erasing recovery ...
root@OpenWrt:/tmp# mtd write ten64-recovery-snapshot-r11175-962c7dae57-layerscape-armv8_64b-traverse-ls1088-initramfs-kernel.itb recovery
Unlocking recovery ...

Writing from ten64-recovery-snapshot-r11175-962c7dae57-layerscape-armv8_64b-traverse-ls1088-initramfs-kernel.itb to recovery ...