Network unstable with vexpress model

[Loïc Minier]

Hey

When using the vexpress model with linux, the network connection appears to be unstable. I'm using Ubuntu oneiric's vexpress kernel and a d-i initrd; running busybox' wget inside this environment, writing to /dev/null (so not involving e.g. the SD card), wget will succeed 3/4 times, then fail with "can't connect to remote host: Network unreachable". This never happens from the host where qemu is being run from. This happens with both IPv4 and IPv6.

This requires pressing "retry" a dozen of times during d-i startup, and prevents installation during debootstrap as debootstrap is unable to retry downloads and reports a corrupted Packages file.

Thanks,

[Peter Maydell (pmaydell)]

Loic: is this still a problem with recent qemu-linaro and with the command line option that adds cache=writeback to the sd card?

[Loïc Minier (lool)]

1.0 based package not yet available in precise; will recheck once it's there

[Peter Maydell (pmaydell)]

loic: ping again regarding retesting this bug; precise should have a 1.0 based qemu-linaro now.

[Loïc Minier (lool)]

I've retested today on an up-to-date precise system with qemu-system 1.0.50-2012.01-0ubuntu3; I took initrd.gz and vmlinuz from:
http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/dists/oneiric/main/installer-armel/current/images/linaro-vexpress/netboot/
created a 500M blank sd.img disk with:
dd if=/dev/zero of=sd.img bs=1M count=500
and started d-i with:
qemu-system-arm -M vexpress-a9 -kernel vmlinuz -initrd initrd.gz -m 1024 -drive file=/tmp/sd.img,if=sd,cache=writeback -append "root=/dev/ram fb=y"
I got a "http://xyz/Packages.gz is corrupt" message early after configuring my mirror (this file isn't actually corrupt), which indicates there are still some issues, but that's the only error I've got, indicating that the error rate is much lower with cache=writeback-append