Welland NetShare GX ME 752GNS with SnakeOs - vanaware/snake-os GitHub Wiki
Effort to run snakeos on Welland NetShare GX ME-752GNS
link: https://code.google.com/archive/p/snake-os/issues/369
link: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/dealextreme-nas-/XeJUtvHSn50
link: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/dealextreme-nas-/c8DsbVI_m3Q
Specs: SoC: CNS2183 RAM: 32MB Flash: 1MB EN25F80
Welland Netshare GX-752ANS has:
- Processor ARM CNS2183-250-FP128-AEFA-G Cavium Star
- 8Mbit flash memory Eon E25F80?-100HCP
- Ethernet 10/100/100 Gigabit provide from IC+ IP1001LF chip
- Sata Link SPIF225A-HL232
- RAM memory NANYA NT5DS16M16CS-5T.
There are two rows of headers on the board: JTAG: VCC|TRST|TDI|TMS|TCK|TDO|SRST|GND Serial: X|DATA|DATA|X|GND
The SoC seems to be more or less the same as the STR8132/CNS2132 except with gigabit ethernet.
The flash is way too small for snake. So instead of installing the whole OS I've just put the boot loader on it, the rest is loaded from USB disk. I've ported the changes from our ancient u-boot version to the current one to get USB boot support.
I've only done limited testing, but so far this setup seems to work ok. One issue: I tried the new u-boot on my Ritmo LN-86BT and it has serious trouble detecting the builtin SD card reader, which is a bit worrying because it's also attached via USB..
Installation:
First the usual disclaimer.. DO THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK. IF SOMETIHNG GOES WRONG THE DEVICE IS PROBABLY TOAST.
The original firmware updater refuses to install a bootloader that is larger than 65k, u-boot is, so that check needs to be disabled. The main part of the firmware can't be easily modified because it's compressed. To get around this the bootloader is replaced with a modified version that disables the size check after decompressing the firmware.
Make sure the device is running firmware version G5S6070400159D0 1.59 (it's attached G5S6070400159D0.bin). Using the modified bootloader with a different one would make it randomly overwrite bytes of memory .. that would be bad..
Anyway.. the procedure:
Install g101-g5s6070400159d0-boot-sizecheckhack.bin
Install g101-u-boot.bin
Format an usb stick as FAT and put cns21xx.bin on it.
Plug usb stick into it, power up and pray.
I'm a bit disappointed by the network performance. Iperf reports ~90mb/s. It is suspicously close to 100mb/s and the results from the non-gigabit devices.. so maybe it's just a driver issue that can be fixed.
Reset Procedure:
there's a reset button. with the power on, push that in and hold it for a minute.
that should reset it to factory default.
default IP address of NAS; 169.254.0.1
you have to set the IP of your computer to be on the same subnet, in this case that would be a computer ip of 169.254.0.XXX
xxx can be any number that's not in use, like .1. pick a number between say 20 and 250 that another device on your network isn't already using.
hope that helps.
Packages:
link: https://code.google.com/archive/p/snake-os/downloads