Partition Manager

From the WiFi thread:

On the PartMan front, Jon. It would be good to have a 5.28 build available for testing purposes.

An observation- PartMan coped reasonably well with the 5.28 files being removed over the weekend by ROOL. ;)

It scrapes the stable and nightly build from the download page, so provided that page doesn’t radically change it should cope with ROOL updates. It does the same to find the latest NetSurf. PackMan, Tinct, SparkFS, IconV, CryptRandom and SharedUnixLibrary are all pulled from their respective PackMan sources.

You’d have to put 5.28 on manually after building, as it’s not an advertised download.

I did notice it didn’t quite get the HD4 name correct when it rolled over to 5.30, which I’ve now corrected.

I’m currently adding the NVMe and WiFi drivers as additional software downloads, so hope to have those working on 1st boot soon.

From the WiFi thread:

Another issue is selecting both the “BMC43 WiFi” and “Ethernet over USB”:
- when I rebooted with non-working WiFi, I got a “duplicate route” error box on entry of the desktop.
- when I rebooted with working WiFi, Ethernet over USB was forcibly disabled. This should normally be the reverse!

Where I’ve been testing this for the PM update, I’ve modified the !Internet startup script to first try the NIC (it also detects if there is a NIC to avoid locks on Zero’s) and if that doesn’t get an IP from a DHCPExecute, load the WiFi driver and use that instead. It then behaves as you’d expect, defaulting to the LAN if its plugged in or the WiFi if its not.

I’ve yet to test if you can have both LAN and WiFi connected at the same time and have it handle the routing correctly. I suspect not as the network stack isn’t stateful.

The caveat of both NIC and WiFi when booting is it can take a while for the NIC to timeout the DHCP request before the WiFi is tried, so not ideal. The best solution would be if I could check if the NIC has a connection and skip it if not – I’m not sure if that’s implemented in the driver though.

For the time being, I’ll probably add a tickbox for the NIC and WiFi so you can either have it default to just one of them at 1st boot, or have it try the NIC and fallback to WiFi.

PM 1.03 beta is now available for testing with ROOL WiFi/NVMe drivers added.

I’ve not extensively tested the changes, but it now downloads the latest NVMe and WiFi drivers when initialising a Pi Bootdrive. I confirmed Pi1’s connect via the NIC and WiFi wins out on a Pi3, with RJ45 as a fallback. I performed no testing to confirm the NVMe drivers work correctly as I do not have a suitable device.

Something I will note is that the NVMe drivers as provided in the ROOL download package install to PreDesk – which combined with the changes to SetChoices break the initial setup of Choices.Boot on 1st boot. To work around that, I’ve relocated the drivers to !Boot.Resources.!System.500.Modules.NVMe and instead inject an !!NVMeFS Obey that loads them into PreDesk, via the 5xx hook folders.

I was trying the 1.03 release but it gets “stuck”, very stuck.

Initalise Pi Boot
Tries to get NVMe files, says Retry 5, so I click Skip
Tries to get WiFi files, says Aborted, Retry, but anything more is off the edge of the dialog
None of the buttons then do anything and it just sits there

I haven’t tried leaving it more than about more than a minute before I restarted the OS

Networking works as I updated Partition Manager via !PackMan

I was trying the 1.03 release but it gets “stuck”, very stuck.

I’ve just tested and built a Pi Bootdrive without any issues.

Tries to get NVMe files, says Retry 5, so I click Skip

I think you’re referring to the pre-step where it trawls the ROOL page for the current version URLs, so before you’ve got to the dialogue to set the drive size etc? The would imply it couldn’t connect to the download page – so could be a number of things: DNS not resolving, IP routing, the page was being updated or simply unavailable, issues with the version of AcornHTTP/AcornSSL/URL Module loaded.

None of the buttons then do anything and it just sits there

That sounds like a bug, as it should have failed the whole process if it couldn’t trawl the download page. I’ll check the code.

I restarted the OS

If it happens again, use ALT-Break to terminate Partition Manager and then re-run it in Debug mode by holding ALT when you launch it. That might give some more information in DEBUG/TXT – I don’t recall what additional debug info I added to the scrape stage though.

If it’s consistently happening, check you can manually download the NVMe driver and let me know what versions of AcornHTTP/AcornSSL/URL are loaded after you ALT-Break it.

Will do!

Ok, it worked today, so it must have had network issues yesterday after updating other things.

Nice work Jon, thanks for the latest.

I’ve created a partitioned Pi card successfully (I think) I select clicked the iconbar icon just to verify the boot partition and files were present. Filer window opened just fine. When I menu click (to dismount) the machine freezes, accompanied by various effects (mouse pointer going small, sometimes “Application may have gone wrong…” window).

Created with PM 1.03 on RISC OS 5.30 on Pi 3B. Unfort I don’t have many micro SD cards at the moment to try so it could the one dodgy SD card? No problem with other partitioned cards such as one bought from ROOL. Unfort I don’t have many SD cards at the moment to try.

Did it work after a reboot? As most filesystems don’t support device detach/attach, technically you’re supposed to reboot after any partition changes.

PM uses some tricks to work around that limitation, by restarting the filing system Module and triggering the Filers into thinking the Wimp is starting up. It’s possible a Filer has caused stack imbalance – which I have seen in a few Filers that don’t shutdown correctly.

What filing systems did you have present at the time? SDFS, SCSIFS…anything else? Were any other apps open at the time that might have been using a filing system?

The other posibility is if another device was attached to the filing system you formatted the drive on. RISC OS goes a bit nuts if a drive it expects to exist suddenly disappears.

Having said all that, in all the testing I’ve done, I’ve never seen anything like what you’ve described. The worst I’ve seen is Wimp crash when an HCCS Podule is installed – but PM live-patches that bug and it’s not relevant here anyway. The worst I’ve seen under RISC OS 5 is when you try formatting a drive on the same filing system as the boot drive…which can cause RISC OS to get into an “insert drive X” loop.

When I menu click (to dismount) the machine freezes, accompanied by various effects

That sounds like an old Fat32FS bug (MENU click on drive icon freezes machine if drive has 2 or more FAT partitions). To be honest I haven’t checked if it is still present in the latest Fat32FS version, as I studiously avoid putting more than one FAT partition on a device.

Jon, I had the microSD card and its adaptor plugged into the USB port of my HDD docking thingy.
I tried plugging it in to a spare USB on the Raspberry Pi itself, problem disappeared.
Strange though why the other SD cards were ok when plugged into the HDD docking USB port.
Anyway, I will remember in future to use the Pi’s ports.