The official Mender documentation explains how Mender works. This is simply a board-specific complement to the official documentation.
Board description
BeagleBone Black is a low-cost, community-supported development platform for developers and hobbyists based on AM335x 1GHz ARM® Cortex-A8
URL: https://beagleboard.org/black
Wiki: https://elinux.org/Beagleboard:BeagleBoneBlack
Test results
BeagleBone Black is one of the official reference devices of Mender and is easy to get started with. This device is continuously tested as part of Mender testing pipelines which assures high quality of the integration.
The Yocto Project releases in the table below have been tested by the Mender community. Please update it if you have tested this integration on other Yocto Project releases:
| Yocto Project | Build | Runtime |
|---|---|---|
| zeus (3.0) |  |
|
| warrior (2.7) | |
|
| thud (2.6) | |
|
| sumo (2.5) | |
|
Build Means that the Yocto Project build using this Mender integration completes without errors and outputs images.
Runtime Means that Mender has been verified to work on the board. For U-Boot-based boards, the integration checklist has been verified.
Getting started
Prerequisites
- A supported Linux distribution and dependencies installed on your workstation/laptop as described in the Yocto Mega Manual
- NOTE. Instructions depend on which Yocto version you intend to use.
- Google repo tool installed and in your
PATH.
Configuring the build
Set the Yocto Project branch you are building for:
# set to your branch, make sure it is supported (see table above)
BRANCH="warrior"
Create a directory for your mender-beaglebone setup to live in and clone the meta information.
mkdir mender-beaglebone && cd mender-beaglebone
Initialize repo manifest:
repo init -u https://github.com/mendersoftware/meta-mender-community \
-m meta-mender-beaglebone/scripts/manifest-beaglebone.xml \
-b ${BRANCH}
Fetch layers from manifest:
repo sync
Next, initialize the build environment:
source setup-environment beaglebone
Building the image
Build your image by running:
bitbake core-image-base
Replace core-image-base with your desired image target.
Using the build output
After a successful build, the images and build artifacts are placed in tmp/deploy/images/beaglebone-yocto,
tmp/deploy/images/beaglebone-yocto/core-image-base-beaglebone-yocto.sdimgtmp/deploy/images/beaglebone-yocto/core-image-base-beaglebone-yocto.mender
The disk image (with .sdimg suffix) is used to provision the device storage for devices without Mender running already. Please proceed to the official documentation on provisioning a new device for steps to do this.
Hint: You may need to hold the Boot Button (S2) (near the SD card slot, but on the other side of the PCB) and, while holding this button, insert the USB/power lead to connect the power in order to force booting from SD card.
On the other hand, if you already have Mender running on your device and want to deploy a rootfs update using this build, you should use the Mender Artifact files, which have .mender suffix. You can either deploy this Artifact in managed mode with the Mender server (upload it under Releases in the server UI) or by using the Mender client standalone mode.
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