sdcard_boot

SD card boot for Xiegu GSOC

The purpose of this document is to preapare SD card for new Debian system.

1. Prepare SD card.

Please follow official(?) firmware upgrade procedure and burn image (sdcard.img) to your SD card. For example:

dd if=sdcard.img of=/dev/sdXXX bs=8M

Where sdXXX is SD device recognized by a kernel. If unsure please execute dmesg and find out in kernel messages.

2. Script for uBoot on SD card

This script will disable device renaming by the kernel and makes output to tty1 instead of ttyS0

Compile:

mkimage -A arm -O linux -T script -C none -a 0 -e 0 -d uboot.script boot.scr

and overwrite boot.scr file on the firmware update SD card (first partition). For example:

mount /dev/sdXXX1 /mnt
cp boot.scr /mnt
umount /mnt

3. Prepare partition

Once the SD card is flashed use you favorite partitioning tool and remove /dev/sdXXX2 and /dev/sdXXX3 partitions. Then create new Linux partition with ext4 filesystem on it. It should become /dev/sdXXX2. My preffered tool of choice is cfdisk, as it's interacive and is much user friendly than fdisk. If everything went well one should have SD card with two partitions:

• /dev/sdXXX1 with uImgae, boot.scr, xiegu-a20-gsoc.dtb
• /dev/sdXXX2 which should be empty

Depending on a tool used for creating second partition, filesystem creation might be required. If unsure please run:

mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdXXX2

Note: Change XXX to a letter assigned by the operaing system. If unsure type dmesg and find out in kernel messages.

4. Write Debian to SD card

Copy your Debian distro files to the empty partition on your SD card ... and that's it. Pendrive should be ready to use.

For Debian creation please refer to this section.