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Simple Target Image Builder

This repository contains a simple but straightforward system to create a bootable Linux system for the I2SE Duckbill and EVAchargeSE device series: for Duckbill devices it compiles U-Boot as boot loader, for EVAchargeSE it uses Freescale/NXP's imx-bootlets as bootloader, then it compiles a Linux kernel with device tree blobs and creates a root filesystem based on Debian Jessie 8 (armel). Then all is packed into a single disk image, ready to be used on the SD card (for older Duckbills) and/or the internal eMMC.

This system is intended to be run on a recent Linux system, currently Debian Jessie 8 and Ubuntu 14.04 (LTS) is supported. The main reason for this is, that both distributions come with precompiled cross compiler packages, however, if you have a working cross compiler for 'armel' at hand, you can simply make it available in PATH and change the CROSS_COMPILE setting in the Makefile.

Compared to other Embedded Linux build systems (e.g. ptxdist, OpenWrt...) this system is limited by design. Please remember the following design decisions when using it:

  • This system is intended to be run on a developer (none-shared) host. No precautions are taken to prevent this system running in parallel with a second instance in the same base directory.
  • This system heavily uses sudo to handle the file permissions of the target linux system properly. So ensure that the system user you are using has the required permissions.
  • You need a working internet connection to download the Debian packages for the target system. Only some minor efforts are done to cache the downloaded files.

Workflow to generate an image file

To ensure that your host environment is setup corrctly, we have prepared a Makefile target which helps you to install the distro packages as required. Simply issue a

$ make jessie-requirements

or

$ make trusty-requirements

and see which packages are fetched and installed via apt. Note, that the multistrap tool in Ubuntu is faulty, so it's patched at this stage when the broken package is detected. This step need to be run only once.

Note: Due to a bug in multistrap, please ensure that your working directory name does not include any whitespace characters, otherwise multistrap will fail. See Debian Bug 803365 for details.

This repository uses submodules to link/access various required sources and tools. So after cloning this repo, you have to init these submodules first:

$ make prepare

Since the linux kernel project size is around 1.2 GB, this can take a while; however, if you do not delete this directory, this is only required once. Later, hoping between branches and pulling new changesets in, is really fast.

After this, compile the required tools, U-Boot and linux kernel for Duckbill:

$ make tools u-boot linux

In case of EVAcharge SE compile the tools, linux kernel and imx-bootlets:

$ make tools linux imx-bootlets

Now it's time to create the basic Debian root filesystem with multistrap:

$ make rootfs

However, we want to customize it a little bit:

$ make install

And now, we pack all into a single SD card/eMMC image and split it into smaller chunks so that we can deploy it during manufacturing process:

$ make disk-image

The resulting images/image parts are here:

$ ls -la images

To clean up everything generated by this makefile, simply run:

$ make distclean

Product variants

The original Duckbill (v1) has a SD card slot, the newer Duckbill v2 have an internal eMMC flash chip. To select your target device, give this information via command line argument to the makefile on each invocation, e.g.

$ make HWREV=v1 rootfs

Valid hardware revisions for Duckbill are at the moment: v1 and v2. This parameter doesn't have any effect for EVAcharge SE.

There are multiple product variants available. To select the variant your are building an image for, use PRODUCT command line argument, e.g.

$ make PRODUCT=duckbill-spi rootfs

Valid products are: duckbill, duckbill-spi, duckbill-enocean, duckbill-485 and evachargese.

You can also combine both variables, e.g.

$ make PRODUCT=duckbill HWREV=v1 rootfs

Default values are PRODUCT=duckbill and HWREV=v2.

These settings influence the default package selection and the U-Boot environment (fdt_file is switched in the image file).

SD card / eMMC partitioning

The target SD card/eMMC images contain two primary partitions:

Device         Boot Start     End Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/mmcblk0p1 *     2048    4095    2048    1M 53 OnTrack DM6 Aux3
/dev/mmcblk0p2       6144 3751935 3745792  1.8G 83 Linux

The first partition is required for the Freescale i.MX28 platform as it contains the boot stream, used by the i.MX28 internal ROM to bring up the device. In our case, this partition contains U-Boot as bootloader. This partition is required to have the partition id 0x53 and is 1 MiB in size.

The second partition is a normal ext4 linux filesystem containing the root filesystem. It must also contain a subdirectory /boot in which the kernel zImage and one or multiple device tree files (e.g. imx28-duckbill.dtb) reside. Please note, that U-Boot will look after these files during boot, so when renaming files in this directory also update the U-Boot environment variables image and fdt_file accordingly.

Another important point to note is, that the second partition is created as a small partition of around 340 MB (this may also vary depending on the product variant since various products include various packages pre-installed). Then during the first boot, the partition is resized on-the-fly to fill up the whole space available. This done to be able to distribute small images and to not depend on the exact size of the eMMC or SD card used (e.g. even two SD cards labeled both with 2 GB may differ in exact size). One drawback of this approach is, that the device needs to reboot during this first boot because the new partition size is not recognized by the linux kernel as the partition is busy.