NXP® i.MX 8M Mini Evaluation Kit

The official Mender documentation explains how Mender works. This is simply a board-specific complement to the official documentation.

Board description

The i.MX 8M Mini EVK provides a platform for comprehensive evaluation of the i.MX 8M Mini and i.MX 8M Mini Lite applications processors. It delivers high performance with power efficiency, multimedia interfaces, and Wi-Fi/BT for connectivity out-of-the box.

The two-board solution consists of a compact 2”x2”compute module and a larger base board that brings out the broad connectivity that is needed for product evaluation. The compute module is a proven, compact reference to accelerate your own design.

URL: Vendor board specs

Test results

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
sumo (imx-4.14.98-2.0.0_ga) :test_works: :test_unknown:
zeus (imx-5.4.3-2.0.0_demo_mender) :test_works: :test_unknown:

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

Setup Yocto environment

Create a directory for your mender-imx setup to live in and clone the
meta information.

mkdir mender-imx && cd mender-imx

Initialize repo manifest:

repo init -u https://source.codeaurora.org/external/imx/imx-manifest -b imx-linux-sumo -m imx-4.14.98-2.0.0_demo_mender.xml

Fetch layers in manifest:

repo sync

Setup build environment

Initialize the build environment:

DISTRO=fsl-imx-xwayland MACHINE=imx8mmevk . fsl-setup-mender.sh -b build

Configure Mender server URL (optional)

This section is not required for a successful build but images that are generated by default are only suitable for usage with the Mender client in standalone mode, due to lack of server configuration.

You can edit the conf/local.conf file to provide your Mender server configuration, ensuring the generated images and Mender Artifacts are connecting to the Mender server that you are using. There should already be a commented section in the generated conf/local.conf file and you can simply uncomment the relevant configuration options and assign appropriate values to them.

Build for Hosted Mender:

# To get your tenant token:
#    - log in to https://hosted.mender.io
#    - click your email at the top right and then "My organization"
#    - press the "COPY TO CLIPBOARD"
#    - assign content of clipboard to MENDER_TENANT_TOKEN
#
MENDER_SERVER_URL = "https://hosted.mender.io"
MENDER_TENANT_TOKEN = "<copy token here>"

Building the image

You can now proceed with building an image:

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 build/tmp/deploy/images/imx8mmevk/.

  • build/tmp/deploy/images/imx8mmevk/core-image-base-imx8mmevk.sdimg
  • build/tmp/deploy/images/imx8mmevk/core-image-base-imx8mmevk.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.

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.

References


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6 posts were split to a new topic: Custom iMX8M board

I narrowed it down a bit more. Seems to do more with the initialization scripts and how it populates the dynamic layers. Working on a revised script.

fixed issue by modifying startup script

I could not find the manifest in https://source.codeaurora.org/external/imx/imx-manifest/tree/?h=imx-linux-zeus . Is it yet to be updated?

Yeah, not yet merged.

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You can use my fork instead for the time being

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Does Mender support booting from the eMMC and doing A/B updates on the eMMC of this board or just the SDCard?

There are some settings in local.conf that are commented that are for the eMMC. It should work just by changing those variables.

I’m building it now … for 2nd time. Had to build on Ubuntu 18.04 after build died on Ubuntu 20.04 due to some bison errors.

Yeah, Ubuntu 20 is newer than the sumo branch so not terribly surprising there are issues. I keep a Yocto crops container around based on Ubuntu 16 for when I have to build older branches.

To be clear, I’m talking about using hardware partitions mmcblk2boot0 and mmcblk2boot1.

Thanks,

Brian

Hi @hutchman those partitions are only big enough for the bootloader. I do not know if U-Boot on this platform is configured to use them or not. But the Linux root filesystem will need to be on standard /dev/mmcblk*p* partitions.

Drew

Yes I know, I want A/B of u-boot to use those partitions for redundant boot.

Not out of the box. That would likely require updates to U-Boot itself.

Are there plans to update for dunfell in the near future?

Not that I am aware of. Perhaps @kacf or @lluiscampos would know better for this platform.
Drew

I know the original submitter is not working on it at the moment, so it’s effectively unmaintained unless someone else in the community steps up.