Crippled Redboot
12 March 2008From working with evaluation boards for the intel ixp4xx and ixp24xx i have some previous experience with Redboot and i always liked its power and flexibility. Given this i really don’t like the Redboot found on the NAS-4220 (and other SL351x based systems). It has been stripped of a lot of functionality i came to expect. StormLink, the vendor of the SL351x SOC, who also created the software distribution running on nearly all of these systems, has for instance removed the whole set of commands used to manipulate the internal flash (fis_*). These commands have been replaced with some simple pre-canned choices. I guess the idea behind this was to make future software upgrades easier for them because all manufactures using their SOC and software can be expected to have the same flash layout?
[ Update: I have been wrong on this one. You can actually delete and create new flash partitions through the menu system… ]
