[CFW 3.10] Customised Firmware v3.10 released.

af123

af123

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Version 3.10 of the customised firmware has now been released and is available for download via the Wiki at http://wiki.hummy.tv/wiki/Firmware_Downloads

There are a fair few changes in this update to add support for disks larger than 2TB on the HDR model and to improve/resolve several things that have been discussed on these forums over the past year.

Notes:
  • There is no special upgrade procedure required for this version - it can be safely installed on top of any previous CFW version, or on top of any official Humax version in a single step;
  • During programming, there will be a disconcerting prolonged pause around the 91% mark - usually around three minutes - before installation continues;
  • There are several versions available based on different versions of the underlying Humax firmware - refer to http://wiki.hummy.tv/wiki/Which_Version for the pros and cons of each.
A lot of people have contributed to this release through testing or suggestions. Special thanks are due to Colsta who spent a lot of time loading test kernels and swapping disks to help get to the bottom of the drive initialisation heisenbug; to prpr for lots of testing, bug fixes and feedback - and extensively testing support for USB drives in various configurations and formats, and to Black Hole and Brian for installing and testing all of the various beta versions on their myriad of boxes. Thank you very much everyone who contributed in any way to this release.

Full release notes:

3.10 (13.03.2016)
  • Add support for large hard disks (> 2^32 sectors [~2TB with 512-byte logical sectors]) - internal and USB-attached;
  • Update SATA driver to fix rare problems initialising some disks (e.g. WD20EURX);
  • RFC 1323 TCP window scaling is disabled by default (as per the tcpfix package);
  • Add support for automatically mounting GPT disks connected via USB;
  • Add new Safe Mode which disables almost all custom firmware components - useful for troubleshooting without having to load stock firmware (which isn't possible with large drives). Safe Mode can be enabled via the web interface diagnostics page or telnet menu and disabled in the same way;
  • Initial web interface installation (CFW Bootstrap) now tests repository connectivity using TCP instead of ICMP;
  • Updated fix-disk:
    • Add support for GPT partitioned disks;
    • New -y option to automatically answer yes to most prompts;
    • For AF drives with a pending/unreadable logical sector, fix-disk now checks and attempts to repair the entire physical sector;
    • Backup copies of the disk partition table are now kept in flash to aid future recovery;
    • The 6 most recent fix-disk logs are retained for inspection rather than just the last;
  • Updated telnet menu:
    • All options are now words rather than numbers;
    • New gptf option to re-format the internal hard disk using the GPT scheme;
    • New safe option to toggle safe mode;
    • New upgrade option to upgrade all installed packages;
    • New webif option to install the initial web interface (if missing);
    • New fixweb option to re-enable web server and re-install the web interface;
    • New reboot option to restart the Humax in as clean a way as possible other than to use the remote control;
  • Updates to bootstrap web pages (those shown during boot or when in different modes):
    • HTML format fixes;
    • Served images are now browser-cacheable;
    • The initial web page shown before the disk is initialised now says that the system is still initialising and will automatically refresh to the standard web interface once it's running. If no disk is found within 20 seconds then an appropriate page is shown;
    • Web pages are shown when in maintenance or safe modes with an option to restart in normal mode;
  • Set system clock from front panel Micom early in boot sequence (required for bootstrap caching);
  • Provide consistent and deterministic behaviour if multiple boot modes are selected together (Maintenance mode wins followed by Safe, then Reset and finally RMA);
  • New boot.log file consolidates messages from boot-time;
  • New -d option to diag command to dump the diagnostic code to the terminal instead of running it;
  • Include gdisk, sgdisk and sfdisk utilities for partition table management;
  • Update smartctl, hdparm and ext2 utilities;
  • Include basic vi and more commands in flash;
  • Remove some unused/non-working/superseded commands from flash (fsck, syslogd, klogd, inetd).
 
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I have just installed this on my HD-FOX T2, the box did not reboot during installation, and finished with "END" as usual. After reconnecting my external HDD, I rebooted the box, and saw "F 3.10" on the display. When accessing the web interface, I was greeted with "No Disk found", this remained after rebooting the box again.

The box can see the attached external HDD, but the web interface does not seem to.
 
Brian said:
I have just installed this on my HD-FOX T2, the box did not reboot during installation
Click to expand...
The second reboot is only if there is a loader update required.. I doubt that's likely for most people now - I've removed the note.

The box can see the attached external HDD, but the web interface does not seem to.
Click to expand...
Damn, there's a bug in the initialisation script - will only affect HD models. I'll have to push a 3.11 up for that model!
 
Installed on two of my HDRs.

On Humax [Green], after 'END' on the display, I removed the USB stick and pressed the Standby button to reboot. The unit did reboot, but just after the display showed 'Custom FW 3.10', it said 'Crash' and immediatly rebooted. This time the unit booted fine and works as-per usual.

On Humax [Orange], this did not happen, it just rebooted after 'End' as it should.

I wonder why?
 
af123 said:
The second reboot is only if there is a loader update required.. I doubt that's likely for most people now - I've removed the note.


Damn, there's a bug in the initialisation script - will only affect HD models. I'll have to push a 3.11 up for that model!
Click to expand...
That's okay, the box seems to be working as usual, but without the CF features.
 
Seagate ST4000VM000 Pipeline 4000 GB
Working great with this probably one of the best drives for Humax
Great work!
 
I think this must be the most significant update to the CF since it was first released. af123 must have been very busy (and I now have a lot of documentation to check through!).
 
Likewise. Web server seems to be down.
Code: 
telnet wiki.hummy.tv 80
Trying 89.248.55.76...
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection refused
 
Do we know if there are any limits on the supported disk drive size other than the GPT scheme itself?

(I have alerted af to the server problem)
 
Black Hole said:
Do we know if there are any limits on the supported disk drive size other than the GPT scheme itself?
Click to expand...
Not definitively.
With 4TB the Humax on-TV UI seems to handle it fine so at least that code is written in a generic way (it continues to fudge the reserved size in the same way too). My disk has 7814037168 512-byte sectors (4000787 MB) so even at 4TB they must be using at least 64 bits to store the values. If that's the case then there is no practical limit.
FWIW, at least one person has reported success with an 8TB drive - is there a larger AV drive at the moment?
 
8TB is an awful lot of telly!

Hmm. If we are pessimistic and assume 64-bit signed arithmetic, 2^63 x 512-byte sectors is (roughly) 10^24 bytes... that's a million million TB!!!
 
My friend (see posts passim) has a mostly full 2TB disk, and suffers badly from performance issues. e.g. bringing up the media browser, on the standard UI (on-telly) takes forever.

He'd put this down to the UI needing to build a full picture of what's there, recursively - which it needs to in order to give cumulative sizes - and perhaps not caching it.

So his assumption was that larger than 2TB wouldn't be sensible, at least not when getting full.

but perhaps his problem is something else? Has anyone with >= 2TB disks had them other than mostly empty?

I don't see his problem with my full-ish 1TB disk, at least.

thanks...
 
My 2TB was always around half full and was only slow at bringing up the media list when something like background decryption was in progress.
It definitely doesn't build a complete in-memory view of the disk contents and the processes that do scan the disk (such as the DLNA indexer) don't generally cause performance issues.
It's likely that the disk has some uncorrectable sectors that need addressing.

FWIW without measurements, my 4TB feels much faster than the previous 2TB.
 
Despite what is said about the Ext3 format, there has to be fragmentation issues of some kind. As a disk gets full and space is recycled, the file system is going to be scattered all over the drive and will require long chains of random accesses by any process which scans it. If any of those accesses hit a sector that requires retries, the processing time will be extended further.

We already know that the extra processing required by sector retries is capable of disturbing even live video.
 
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