Consequently all development on Kernel 5.4 and DMA driver has stopped, unfortunately. That said, kernels 4.9 and 4.19 are still full functional and performant.
Kernel patches and Debian release for Western Digital My Book Live.
NOTE: these customizations will void your warranty and are delivered on best-effort only
NOTE: while the posted methods allow you to fully customize a MBL without ever opening it, you need to keep in mind that there might be a failure which requires you to ultimately open up the shell.
NOTE: none of this work is tested on a My Book Live DUO for the simple reason that we don't own one. That said it, community members have successfully deployed on MBL Duo.
- My disk died: in this scenario, you may have to open up your MBL if your warranty is void and you will be exposed to the "complexity" of Linux commands/shell scripts, formatting, u-boot, etc. It's a good time to explore all the possibilities.
- Supportability: original firmware comes with Debian Lenny (5.0.x), which was released in February 2009. Security and other updates have been discontinued as of February 2012. While Western Digital has done a great job to provide updated firmware, it's ultimately impossible to keep up with back-porting vulnerability updates on pre-2010, outdated releases.
- Security vulnerabilities: protect your valuable data (see report)
- Performance: custom kernels can increase your performance by 50%+
- Functionality: many new packages are no longer supported on 2.6 kernels and Debian Jessie (e.g. newer versions of Samba with better Windows 10 support)
- Losing WD support/warranty
- Loss of the graphical user interface: while it's possible to port the original web user interface, it's not really worth it the time and effort.
- debian: Debian 8.11 with security patches backported to PowerPC
- kernel: Kernel patches, pre-compiled kernels and device tree structure
- samba : Optimal perfomance with Samba using sample config files
- uboot : Netconsole support, u-boot boot files, TFTP boot and ways to safely boot My Book Live
Documentation is posted within each section.
- Kernel 2.6.32.71, released Sat, 12 Mar 2016
- Kernel 4.9.169, released Wed, 17 Apr 2019
- Kernel 4.19.99, released Mon, 27 Jan 2020
- 4.19 kernel (pre-compiled and patches) released
- high performance kernel 4.19.99 released
- patches updated for 4.19.99
- section on Samba
- section on cross-compiling kernels
- fixed a few Github postng issues
- released 4.9.149 & 4.9.169
- support for TFTP booting including netconsole support
- initramfs section
- improved section on installing custom kernels on original firmware
- update on Debian sources.list (package repositories)
- (Disk activity) led not working on 4.19 kernels