SolidRun HummingBoard and Cubox-i

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

Device description

HummingBoard is an ARM development board with NXP i.MX6 (ARMv7 architecture) manufactured by SolidRun. Its technical specifications are similar to SolidRun series of small computers Cubox-i. Both HummingBoard and Cubox-i share the same machine name cubox-i from the Yocto/OpenEmbedded BSP layer meta-freescale-3rdparty.

image

Support level

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
kirkstone (4.0) :test_works: :test_works:

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

Set the Yocto Project branch you are building for:

# set to your branch, make sure it is supported (see table above)
export BRANCH="kirkstone"

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

mkdir mender-nxp && cd mender-nxp

Initialize repo manifest:

repo init -u https://github.com/mendersoftware/meta-mender-community \
           -m meta-mender-nxp/scripts/manifest-nxp.xml \
           -b ${BRANCH}

Download mender manifest:

wget --directory-prefix .repo/local_manifests \
    https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mendersoftware/meta-mender-community/${BRANCH}/scripts/mender-no-setup-layers.xml

Fetch layers in manifest:

repo sync -j$(nproc)

Setup build environment

  • Initialize the build environment:
source setup-environment nxp
  • NOTE! You need to accept the Freescale EULA at ‘…/sources/meta-freescale/EULA’. Please read it and in case you accept it, add to your conf/local.conf:
ACCEPT_FSL_EULA = "1"

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 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:

MACHINE=cubox-i 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:

  • deploy/images/cubox-i/core-image-base-cubox-i.mender
  • deploy/images/cubox-i/core-image-base-cubox-i.sdimg

The disk image (with .sdimg suffix) is used to provision the device storage for devices without Mender running already.

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.

Flash instructions

Based on the output artifacts described above we need to flash the core-image-base-cubox-i.sdimg separately to fully provision an device and for it to work with Mender.

Required software on the host PC:

  • bmaptool
sudo apt install bmap-tools

Load image to sd card

sudo bmaptool copy core-image-base-cubox-i.sdimg /dev/sdX

References

HummingBoard i.MX6 SBC
HummingBoard

1 Like
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Hi @leon-anavi,

giving it a test spin I run into an issue with the u-boot - SPL combination snippet. It errs out with

--- Error summary ---
ERROR: u-boot-fslc-2022.10+gitAUTOINC+cbd7eb17ac-r0 do_deploy: ExecutionError('/__w/meta-mender-community/meta-mender-community/gh/cubox-i/build/tmp/work/cubox_i-fslc-linux-gnueabi/u-boot-fslc/2022.10+gitAUTOINC+cbd7eb17ac-r0/temp/run.do_deploy.169345', 1, None, None)
ERROR: Logfile of failure stored in: /__w/meta-mender-community/meta-mender-community/gh/cubox-i/build/tmp/work/cubox_i-fslc-linux-gnueabi/u-boot-fslc/2022.10+gitAUTOINC+cbd7eb17ac-r0/temp/log.do_deploy.169345
ERROR: Task (/__w/meta-mender-community/meta-mender-community/gh/cubox-i/build/../meta-freescale/recipes-bsp/u-boot/u-boot-fslc_2022.10.bb:do_deploy) failed with exit code '1'

which I traced back to the line

install -m 644 ${D}/boot/${SPL_BINARY} ${DEPLOYDIR}/${MENDER_IMAGE_BOOTLOADER_FILE}

So I have to guess there is either something from your environment missing or changed in the mean time.

Greetz,
Josef

1 Like
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Hi @TheYoctoJester,

Sorry for the inconvenience. I was quite busy so I asked @atanas to have a look and he notified me about a couple of issues in the instructions: bitbake was missing from the command and an older mender manifest was used. I fixed the instructions. The step for downloading the manifest uses ${BRANCH} to avoid such issues in future.

Best regards, Leon