Toradex Verdin iMX8M Plus

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

Board description

Verdin iMX8M Plus is a member of the Verdin Family and comes with Toradex Easy Installer pre-installed.

The Verdin iMX8M Plus SoM is based on the NXP® i.MX 8M Plus family of embedded System on Chips (SoCs). The i.MX 8M Plus family consists of the i.MX 8M Plus Quad, i.MX 8M Plus Quad Lite, and i.MX 8M Plus Dual. The top-tier i.MX 8M Plus Quad features four Cortex-A53 cores as the main processor cluster. The cores provide complete 64-bit Armv8-A support while maintaining seamless backward compatibility with 32-bit Armv7-A software. The main cores run at up to 1.8 GHz for commercial graded products and 1.6 GHz for industrial temperature range products.

image

URL: NXP i.MX 8M Plus - Verdin System on Module
Wiki: Verdin iMX8M Plus | Toradex Developer Center

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:

TODO: Update table below with Yocto Project versions tested & result. Sample data:

Yocto Project Build Runtime
dunfell (Yocto 3.1 / Toradex BSP 5.4.0) :test_works: :test_works:
dunfell (Yocto 3.1 / Toradex BSP 5.6.0) :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

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

mkdir mender-toradex && cd mender-toradex

Select the appropriate Toradex BSP version:

export TORADEX_BSP_VERSION=5.6.0

or

export TORADEX_BSP_VERSION=5.4.0

Initialize repo manifest:

repo init -u https://git.toradex.com/toradex-manifest.git \
    -b refs/tags/${TORADEX_BSP_VERSION} \
    -m tdxref/default.xml

Download mender manifest:

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

Fetch layers in manifest:

repo sync -j$(nproc)

Setup build environment

  • Initialize the build environment:
. export
  • Add Mender layers:
echo "BBLAYERS += \" \${TOPDIR}/../layers/meta-mender/meta-mender-core \"" >> conf/bblayers.conf
echo "BBLAYERS += \" \${TOPDIR}/../layers/meta-mender-community/meta-mender-toradex-nxp \"" >> conf/bblayers.conf
echo "TORADEX_BSP_VERSION = \"toradex-bsp-${TORADEX_BSP_VERSION}\"" >> conf/local.conf
  • Add optional Mender demo layer:
# Omit this, if you intend to use this build in production
echo "BBLAYERS += \" \${TOPDIR}/../layers/meta-mender/meta-mender-demo \"" >> conf/bblayers.conf
  • Apply Mender configuration to build environment:
cat ../layers/meta-mender-community/templates/local.conf.append >> conf/local.conf
cat ../layers/meta-mender-community/meta-mender-toradex-nxp/templates/local.conf.append >> conf/local.conf
  • 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"
  • Add Mender specific configurations for verdin-imx8mp for example in your conf/local.conf:
MENDER_BOOT_PART_SIZE_MB = "32"
OFFSET_SPL_PAYLOAD = ""
MENDER_IMAGE_BOOTLOADER_BOOTSECTOR_OFFSET="0"
MENDER_UBOOT_STORAGE_INTERFACE = "mmc"
MENDER_UBOOT_STORAGE_DEVICE = "2"
MENDER_STORAGE_DEVICE = "/dev/mmcblk2"

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=verdin-imx8mp bitbake tdx-reference-minimal-image

Replace tdx-reference-minimal-image with your desired image target.

Using the build output

After a successful build, the images and build artifacts are:

  • deploy/images/verdin-imx8mp/Verdin-iMX8MP_Reference-Minimal-Image.mender
  • deploy/images/verdin-imx8mp/Verdin-iMX8MP_Reference-Minimal-Image.mender_tezi.tar

The .mender_tezi.tar is used to provision the device storage for devices without Mender running already, and is compatible with the Toradex Easy Installer.

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

Refer to the Toradex Easy Installer instructions for more details.

References

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