The official Mender documentation explains how Mender works. This is simply a board-specific complement to the official documentation.
Board description
The Raspberry Pi 4 Model B is the latest addition to the Raspberry Pi family. It is the most powerful board within the Raspberry Pi family.
URL: https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b/
Wiki: https://elinux.org/RPi_Hub
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 Project | Build | Runtime |
|---|---|---|
| 2019.11 |  |
|
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="2019.11-rc1"
Clone or download buildroot:
git clone git://git.buildroot.net/buildroot -b ${BR2_TAG}
Clone this repository:
git clone https://github.com/aduskett/buildroot-mender-configs.git -b rpi4_32
Change directory to buildroot:
cd buildroot
copy all files from buildroot-mender-configs:
cp -rf ../buildroot-mender-configs/* ./
Configure build environment
Configure Buildroot:
Configure build environment
Configure Buildroot:
make raspberrypi4_32_mender_defconfig
Configure Mender server URL (optional)
This section is not required for a successful build but images that are generated by default are only suitable for usage with the Mender client in Standalone deployments, due to lack of server configuration.
You can edit the board/mender/overlay/etc/mender/mender.conf file to provide your Mender server configuration, ensuring the generated images and Mender Artifacts are connecting to the Mender server that you are using.
Build for Hosted Mender:
ServerURL = "https://hosted.mender.io"
TenantToken = "<copy token here>"
Build for Mender demo server:
ServerURL = "192.168.0.100"
Building the image
You can now proceed with building an image:
make
Using the build output
After a successful build, the images and build artifacts are placed in buildroot/output/images
The disk image sdcard.img is used to provision the device storage for devices without Mender running already. Please proceed to the official documentation on provisioning a new device for steps to do this.
On the other hand, if you already have Mender running on your device and want to deploy a rootfs update using this build, you should use the Mender Artifact files, which have .mender suffix. You can either deploy this Artifact in managed mode with the Mender server (upload it under Releases in the server UI) or by using the Mender client only in Standalone deployments.
Created a mender artifact
Open board/mender/post-image.sh and uncomment the line
# create_mender_image "buildroot-rasperrypi-${BR2_VERSION}.mender"
Then re-run
make
The mender file will automatically be generated after the build is complete, which can be found in output/images/