BeagleBoardDebian

This page is about running a (ARM EABI) Debian distribution at BeagleBoard. BeagleBoard will boot the (ARM EABI) Debian distribution from SD card. To prepare the SD card and install (ARM EABI) Debian on it, QEMU on host PC will be used, following Aurélien Jarno's excellent Debian on an emulated ARM machine howto.

Note: Debian armel deb's are compiled for armv4t, this allows debian to support a larger number of arm devices with a single port, at only the sacrifice of speed. For a more optimized and faster system checkout: Mojo Project (armv5el & armv6el-vfp editions). The OMAP3550 on the Beagle Board is armv7-a. See Ubuntu at BeagleBoard page, too.

= QEMU =

Install QEMU on your host PC. This assumes that your host PC is running Debian as well. If not, install QEMU the way your host PC distribution uses. apt-get install qemu Note: If your debian armel image crashes while fscking the partition, rebuild qemu from trunk.

Format SD Card
You will need a 1GB SD card or greater. Standard System : ~455MB + Desktop environment (GNOME) : ~2.9GB

Currently (Aug 15, 2008) ext2load doesn't seem to work in the current u-boot beagle board git repo. For the moment follow the LinuxBootDisk guide to setup a 50-100MB FAT partition on your SD Card to use u-boot's fatload.

Using fdisk and dosfstools on your SD card "/dev/sdX" or use fdisk -l to find device name.

fdisk /dev/sdX

Delete all partitions and create a new 50MB FAT partition for uImage

Disk /dev/sdX: 2038 MB, 2038431744 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 247 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Disk identifier: 0x0008e471 Device Boot     Start         End      Blocks   Id  System Command (m for help): n Command action e  extended p  primary partition (1-4) p Partition number (1-4): 1 First cylinder (1-247, default 1): Using default value 1 Last cylinder or +size or +sizeM or +sizeK (1-247, default 247): +50M Command (m for help): t Selected partition 1 Hex code (type L to list codes): c Changed system type of partition 1 to c (W95 FAT32 (LBA)) Command (m for help): a Partition number (1-4): 1 Command (m for help): w The partition table has been altered! Calling ioctl to re-read partition table.

Format the 1st partition with dosfstools

mkfs.msdos -F 32 /dev/sdX1

For reference, a 2GB sd card will look like this:

Disk /dev/sdb: 2038 MB, 2038431744 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 247 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Disk identifier: 0x0008e471 Device Boot     Start         End      Blocks   Id  System /dev/sdb1  *           1           7       56196    c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)

NOTE: For some reason, on my 256 MB SD card, I had to have End >= 5 AND odd for /dev/sde1 (ie. 6 did not work)

Preparation
Create a working directory to keep your files organized.

mkdir debian-armel cd debian-armel/ wget ftp://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/dists/lenny/main/installer-armel/current/images/versatile/netboot/initrd.gz wget ftp://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/dists/lenny/main/installer-armel/current/images/versatile/netboot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-1-versatile

Install Debian
To install (ARM EABI) Debian inside QEMU:

sudo qemu-system-arm -M versatilepb -kernel vmlinuz-2.6.24-1-versatile -initrd initrd.gz -m 256 -hda /dev/sdX -append "root=/dev/ram mem=256M" Note: root/sudo access is required to access /dev/sde directly & verify /dev/sdX with fdisk -l

Partition disks, default settings should work for most: Guided - use the largest continuous free space



Running Debian
sudo qemu-system-arm -M versatilepb -kernel vmlinuz-2.6.24-1-versatile -m 256 -hda /dev/sde -append "root=/dev/sda2 mem=256M"

Note: Time will be incorrect.

sudo apt-get install ntpdate ntpdate pool.ntp.org

Install default deb packages for linux-image & linux-headers.

wget http://www.rcn-ee.com/deb/lenny/2.6.26-omap1-oer61/linux-image-2.6.26-omap1-oer61_2.6.26-omap1-oer61-10.00.Custom_armel.deb wget http://www.rcn-ee.com/deb/lenny/2.6.26-omap1-oer61/linux-headers-2.6.26-omap1-oer61_2.6.26-omap1-oer61-10.00.Custom_armel.deb sudo dpkg -i *.deb Note: It's easier to download these straight to the sd card after you've mounted the SD card to copy uImage to the FAT partition.

Stop QEMU and remount SD card to copy uImage to FAT partition:

cd /media/disk-1/ wget http://www.rcn-ee.com/deb/lenny/2.6.26-omap1-oer61/uImage

=Beagleboard=

Insert SD Card and power up Beagleboard.

Boot
Using a terminal program, stop u-boot and add these commands:

setenv bootcmd 'mmcinit; fatload mmc 0:1 0x80300000 uImage; bootm 0x80300000' setenv bootargs 'console=ttyS2,115200n8 console=tty0 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootdelay=2 rootfstype=ext3 ro video=omapfb:vram:2M,vram:4M' boot

To force the Beagleboard to always boot the sd card image:

setenv bootcmd 'mmcinit; fatload mmc 0:1 0x80300000 uImage; bootm 0x80300000' setenv bootargs 'console=ttyS2,115200n8 console=tty0 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootdelay=2 rootfstype=ext3 ro video=omapfb:vram:2M,vram:4M' saveenv boot

Note: 'rootwait' only works with newer kernels, for 2.6.22.18-omap3 use 'rootdelay=2', otherwise this error: VFS: Cannot open root device "mmcblk0p2" or unknown-block(2,0) Please append a correct "root=" boot option; here are the available partitions: 1f00       512 mtdblock01f00        512 mtdblock0 (driver?) 1f01      1920 mtdblock11f01       1920 mtdblock1 (driver?) 1f02       128 mtdblock21f02        128 mtdblock2 (driver?) 1f03      5120 mtdblock31f03       5120 mtdblock3 (driver?) 1f04    254464 mtdblock41f04     254464 mtdblock4 (driver?)

Debian on Beagleboard
Debian on BeagleBoard uses the following configuration:


 * Console log = Serial Terminal
 * User Console = HDMI port + usb (keyboard, mouse, etc)

Xorg
Modify /etc/X11/xorg.conf Section "Device" Identifier	"Configured Video Device" Option		"UseFBDev"		"true" Driver		"fbdev" EndSection



Note: 'fbdev' is normally *slow* since it completely relies on the system cpu to update the framebuffer. Once the video processing core's driver is released this will no longer be an issue.

=Current Issues=


 * 1) Swap disabled: change /dev/hda5 -> /dev/mmcblk0p5 in /etc/fstab (artifact of qemu install to /dev/hdaX)
 * 2) RTC seems to be not enabled: use ntpdate when ethernet works, or issue date MMDDHHMMYYYY

=Building a Native Debian Kernel with QEMU=

Install Dependencies
apt-get install git-core kernel-package fakeroot build-essential curl libncurses-dev

u-boot
wget -nc http://beagleboard.googlecode.com/files/u-boot_beagle_revb.tar.gz tar -xf u-boot_beagle_revb.tar.gz cd u-boot/ make CROSS_COMPILE= distclean make CROSS_COMPILE= omap3530beagle_config make CROSS_COMPILE= tools

Add /tools/ to $PATH PATH=/home/ /u-boot/tools:"${PATH}"

Linux Kernel
git clone git://git2.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tmlind/linux-omap-2.6.git cd linux-omap-2.6/ git checkout -b beagle

Patch Kernel as you see fit patch -p1 < ../patches/*.patch

Setup Kernel .config make CROSS_COMPILE= distclean make CROSS_COMPILE= omap3_beagle_defconfig

Create Debian linux-image* & linux-headers* Package make-kpkg --cross_compile - clean CONCURRENCY_LEVEL=1 fakeroot make-kpkg --cross_compile - --initrd kernel_image kernel_headers

Create U-boot uImage make CROSS_COMPILE= uImage

Issues: Debian's gcc-4.3 will fail to build a bootable uImage, so use gcc-4.2 as gcc thru 'update-alternatives'

Successfully Built Images
Example Debian Lenny Kernel Images