# Adding support for custom board

**URL:** <https://hub.mender.io/t/adding-support-for-custom-board/5574>\
**Category:** Debian family\
**Created:** [January 27, 2023, 1:06pm UTC](https://hub.mender.io/t/adding-support-for-custom-board/5574 "2023-01-27T13:06:34Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![azarubkin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/8edcca/32.png) [@azarubkin](https://hub.mender.io/u/azarubkin)\
**Post date:** [January 27, 2023, 1:06pm UTC](https://hub.mender.io/t/adding-support-for-custom-board/5574/1 "2023-01-27T13:06:34Z")

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Hello,

I would like to use Mender with a custom board. It is based on the Beaglebone Black, but with customized hardware, so I had to patch their U-Boot and add a custom device tree to make it boot. And there’s a custom device tree and some configuration changes for the Linux kernel.

How do I convert the image for use with Mender while making sure my changes to U-Boot and kernel will stay intact?

Do I understand correctly that Mender overwrites the bootloader with its custom version to support partition switching? My work is based on [BeagleBoard.org / u-boot · GitLab](https://git.beagleboard.org/beagleboard/u-boot), but Mender has its own [GitHub - mendersoftware/uboot-mender: U-boot fork containing Mender integration (used by https://github.com/mendersoftware/mender-convert)](https://github.com/mendersoftware/uboot-mender), so how do I bring these two together? As far as I understand, Mender’s U-Boot is not based on Beagleboard U-Boot, rather they both are forks of the mainline.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![kacf](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex036/user_avatar/hub.mender.io/kacf/32/146_2.png) [@kacf](https://hub.mender.io/u/kacf)\
**Post date:** [January 30, 2023, 7:35am UTC](https://hub.mender.io/t/adding-support-for-custom-board/5574/2 "2023-01-30T07:35:00Z")

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That’s only if you use direct U-Boot integration, and Mender has not maintained that for Beaglebone for years.

If you use U-Boot/UEFI/Grub integration (`MENDER_GRUB_EFI_INTEGRATION=y` in mender-convert, the default), then Mender uses vanilla U-Boot (see [this section](https://github.com/mendersoftware/mender-convert/blob/master/configs/beaglebone_black_base_config#L1-L8) in mender-convert). IIRC this has broken on the most recent U-Boot versions though, so maybe stay away from the very latest versions.