NXP® i.MX 8MQuad Evaluation Kit (EVK)

Board Integrations Buildroot
,
1

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

Board description

The NXP® i.MX 8MQuad Evaluation Kit (EVK) provides a platform for rapid evaluation of the i.MX 8MQuad, i.MX 8MDual and i.MX 8MQuadLite Applications Processors, utilizing 2 to 4x Arm® Cortex®-A53s and 1x Cortex-M4 cores. It brings High-Performance with Low Power, Flexible options of Memory and High-Speed Interfaces as well as Industry-Leading Audio and Video capabilities.

URL: Vendor board specs

Test results

The Buildroot releases in the table below have been tested by the Mender community. Please update it if you have tested this integration on other releases

Buildroot Build Runtime
2020.02.x :test_works: :test_works:
2019.05.x :test_works: :test_works:

Build Means that the Buildroot 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 Buildroot Manual
    • NOTE. Instructions depend on which Buildroot version you intend to use.

Configuring the build

Setup Buildroot environment

Set the Buildroot tag you are building for:

# set to your branch, make sure it is supported (see table above)
export BR2_TAG="2020.02.x"

Clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/mendersoftware/buildroot-mender -b ${BR2_TAG}

Change directory to buildroot-mender:

cd buildroot-mender

Fetch submodules:

git submodule update --init

Setup build environment

Generate configuration file (Mender configs merged with upstream config):

./buildroot-external-mender/board/freescale/imx8mqevk/gen-defconfig.sh

Configure Buildroot:

make mender_freescale_imx8mqevk_defconfig

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 deployments, due to lack of server configuration.

You can edit the

  • buildroot-external-mender/board/common/rootfs_overlay/etc/mender/mender.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.

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 TenantToken

Example buildroot-external-mender/board/common/rootfs_overlay/etc/mender/mender.conf:

{
  "InventoryPollIntervalSeconds": 5,
  "UpdatePollIntervalSeconds": 5,
  "RetryPollIntervalSeconds": 10,
  "ServerURL": "https://hosted.mender.io",
  "TenantToken": "<paste tenant token here>"
}

Build for Mender demo server

This is if you have followed the Getting started documentation where you launch a Mender server locally and to configure your enviroment to connect to this local server you need to provide the IP address of the server on the local network.

By default the demo enviroment will connect to docker.mender.io and s3.docker.mender.io and we need to make sure that these are resolved to the local IP address of the running server by adding the following entry to /etc/hosts

echo "192.168.0.100" >> buildroot-external-mender/board/common/rootfs_overlay/etc/hosts

No changes are required to the mender.conf file in this case it will be already setup to connecto to docker.mender.io.

Building the image

You can now proceed with building an image:

make

Using the build output

After a successful build, the images and build artifacts are placed in buildroot/output/images,

  • buildroot/output/images/sdcard.img.gz
  • buildroot/output/images/release-1.mender

The disk image with the .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 only in Standalone deployments.

References

If this post was useful to you, please press like, or leave a thank you note to the contributor who put valuable time into this and made it available to you. It will be much appreciated!

2 Likes