I was fiddling around with my newly purchased Beaglebone and wanted to get my hands dirty with kernel hacking and stuff. Since beaglebone is hard-wired to boot off an SD card I found it tedious to shuttle the card between my development laptop and the board.
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Enter TFTP boot.
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This is a very handy way of booting when you need to recompile your kernel repeatedly and inserting/removing the card from/to board becomes a tedious process. For those who wanted to try out this fantastic way of booting, here is my short howto:
Before I begin, here is snapshot of my development platform:
Host machine: am64 lubuntu 12.10
Tftp software: tftp-hpa 5.2 [client and server]
U-boot: 2013.01-dirty
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To install, run: sudo apt-get install tftpd-hpa tftp-hpa
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Before we begin, we need to configure the tftpd’s configuration file so edit:
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sudo vim /etc/default/tftpd-hpa
TFTP_USERNAME="tftp"
TFTP_DIRECTORY="your-ftp-root-directory"
TFTP_ADDRESS="0.0.0.0:69"
TFTP_OPTIONS="--secure"
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After that restart the daemon: sudo service tftpd restart
Now that the server has been setup in our host machine, we may now concentrate on the target system.
Note: The SD card containing MLO and u-boot should always be present in the beaglebone’s slot.
Power up the board and and get to the u-boot prompt:
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U-Boot 2013.01-dirty (Jan 16 2013 - 15:36:41)
I2C: ready
DRAM: 256 MiB
WARNING: Caches not enabled
NAND: No NAND device found!!!
0 MiB
MMC: OMAP SD/MMC: 0, OMAP SD/MMC: 1
*** Warning - readenv() failed, using default environment
musb-hdrc: ConfigData=0xde (UTMI-8, dyn FIFOs, bulk combine, bulk split, HB-ISO Rx, HB-ISO Tx, SoftConn)
musb-hdrc: MHDRC RTL version 2.0
musb-hdrc: setup fifo_mode 4
musb-hdrc: 28/31 max ep, 16384/16384 memory
USB Peripheral mode controller at 47401000 using PIO, IRQ 0
musb-hdrc: ConfigData=0xde (UTMI-8, dyn FIFOs, bulk combine, bulk split, HB-ISO Rx, HB-ISO Tx, SoftConn)
musb-hdrc: MHDRC RTL version 2.0
musb-hdrc: setup fifo_mode 4
musb-hdrc: 28/31 max ep, 16384/16384 memory
USB Host mode controller at 47401800 using PIO, IRQ 0
Net: cpsw, usb_ether
Hit any key to stop autoboot: 0
U-Boot#
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Make sure that ethernet cable is plugged into the board and a dhcp server is running in either your host machine or your router.
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U-Boot# setenv autoload no
U-Boot# dhcp
link up on port 0, speed 100, full duplex
BOOTP broadcast 1
DHCP client bound to address 192.168.1.11
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Next will be configuring the server-ip [our host machine’s IP], kernel’s command line and the load address
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U-Boot# setenv serverip 192.168.1.4
U-Boot# setenv bootfile uImage
U-Boot# setenv bootargs console=ttyO0,115200 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rw rootwait ip=dhcp
U-Boot# tftp 0x80200000 uImage
link up on port 0, speed 100, full duplex
Using cpsw device
TFTP from server 192.168.1.4; our IP address is 192.168.1.11
Filename 'uImage'.
Load address: 0x80200000
Loading: #################################################################
#####################################################T ############
##########################################T #######################
###################################T ########
146.5 KiB/s
done
Bytes transferred = 3484264 (352a68 hex)
U-Boot# bootm 0x80200000
## Booting kernel from Legacy Image at 80200000 ...
Image Name: Angstrom/3.2.28/beaglebone
Image Type: ARM Linux Kernel Image (uncompressed)
Data Size: 3484200 Bytes = 3.3 MiB
Load Address: 80008000
Entry Point: 80008000
Verifying Checksum ... OK
Loading Kernel Image ... OK
OK
Starting kernel ...
Uncompressing Linux... done, booting the kernel.
[ 0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpu
[ 0.000000] Linux version 3.2.28 (koen@Angstrom-F16-vm-rpm) (gcc version 4.5.4 20120305 (prerelease) (GCC) ) #1 Tue Sep 11 13:08:30 CEST 2012
[ 0.000000] CPU: ARMv7 Processor [413fc082] revision 2 (ARMv7), cr=50c53c7d
[ 0.000000] CPU: PIPT / VIPT nonaliasing data cache, VIPT aliasing instruction cache
[ 0.000000] Machine: am335xevm
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And voila! It boots!!!!
Herzeleid 