I’m interested in running Rockstor on a Raspberry Pi 2. I’m willing to try my hand at doing the port, if it doesn’t exist, but I could use some assistance in getting started. I did look at the documentation for developers, but I did have some questions.
Once you get your git repository setup, it sounds like the next thing to do is get a build VM setup. This build VM is a current production Rockstor VM? If so, that doesn’t exist for an arm architecture. If this is a standard vanilla linux environment on the correct target arch, would Raspbian or Ubuntu work as a build VM?
Any help or insights would be greatly appreciated.
I’ve ported Rockstor to Pi 2 several months ago, but went with pidora IIRC. Here’s the image: http://rockstor.com/downloads/rockstor_3.8-0.rpi.img.xz . Give it a try. As the version indicates, it’s rather old. I dropped the idea because performance was really bad and usb 3 drives were dropping(perhaps need dedicated power). You can certainly build latest Rockstor bits on that image and work your way.
If you stick to Fedora flavor, porting and maintenance would be minimal. An ubuntu port would indeed be sweet, but it will be more work and ongoing maintenance as we rely on yum, systemd and other tools that may be different enough.
@jdmessina Welcome to the Rockstor community. First off I think this is a great idea and any help is always greatly appreciated. I’ll have to be brief as it’s a little late here but just wanted to chip in what I could which isn’t much really but:-
Rockstor is essentially a CentOS7.1 (which as of just recently upgrades itself via it’s standard repos (base I think) to 7.2
However as this brings along with it an incompatible python upgrade version 2.7.5.34.el7 there are currently measures in place in Rockstor to downgrade the python version to that which worked in 7.1 ie 2.7.5.18.el7_1.1.
Due to newer kernels being necessary for btrfs the elrepo kernel-ml is used rather than the standard CentOS one which is now pretty old.
A recent version of btrfs-progs is also installed.
My main concern with your suggestion revolves around endian issues and 32 / 64 bit issues. I’m afraid I’m not very familiar with the Raspberry Pi 2 but if it’s 32 bit then that will probably be you greatest issue as I’m pretty sure btrfs is really only developed on / intended for 64bit hardware. I don’t have a reference for this but I think I remember reading a confirmation of this on the linux-btrfs mailing list.
Also multiple drives are rather assumed in btrfs / Rockstor as a key feature / capability of the hardware although not of course absolutely necessary and given the Pi’s have very limited capability this way I think that may present another issue. Note that usb attached hdd’s are not generally held in high regard due to the additional layer of interface and the flakey nature of some of the hw found in these units.
@suman is the chap to talk to here but then I see he has just posted with some interesting info so I’ll leave my comment at the above.
Thanks for the quick responses @suman an and @phillxnet! I downloaded the 3.8 image, but the RPi won’t boot on it. I’ll continue to play around with it and try the CentOS image as well.
I have a 4 bay USB3 caddy I used to use with a machine that didn’t have enough internal bays and it was terrible, sure on a USB3 port it would get resonable speed if you were transferring a large file off a SINGLE drive, but if you were either working on a lot of small files OR utilising multiple drives the performance would nose dive off a cliff.
I suspect the controller in there had the absolute minimum amount of hardware they could get away with and still have the thing show up as a bunch of USB drives, it just couldn’t handle it if you actually wanted to make use of all those drives at once.
hi @suman_chakravartula,I down the img from your sites enter link description here, then I use DD write the img to the SD(16GB) in linux and I use “Image Writer” write img to the SD(16GB) in windows.They are not work both the two methods in Raspberry pi. My steps have problem? thank you very much!