This is part of my series on running an unmodified Debian on the Joggler. See here for other posts on the same topic.
Since my last post, the helpful folks at Debian have added the missing sdhci_pci module to the installer packages, so now, daily builds of debian-installer do indeed detect the Joggler's internal storage. However, it doesn't quite work right. (shock!)
If you boot up d-i and install to the internal storage, everything will appear to be working fine, and it will install... but if you switch to tty4 where syslog is being displayed, you'll see about a million copies of this message:
mmc2: Too large timeout requested for CMD25!
Every single write to the internal storage causes this message to be printed (CMD25 is the write command). It doesn't prevent the install from working, but when you boot the actual system the console is just filled with this message and you can't see what you're doing. You can change the kernel loglevel so it doesn't spam those messages to the console (adding loglevel=4 to the kernel command line is sufficient here, to disable messages of level warning and below), but they are still getting spewed into klogd, which will, via syslogd... write them to your logfiles.
Yes, you guessed it: this causes more MMC writes, which causes more log spam, which causes more MMC writes... so the system starts spending an unfortunate amount of its resources spiralling its logs out of control. Oh dear. It's not as bad as it could be because the log is buffered, but it's still rather unfortunate. It's possible to hack the logging configuration to "solve" this in various ways, but rather than mess about with that, I wanted to look into why the kernel was printing this message in the first place.
