Google Coral Dev Board

mirzak
Wed, 01 Apr 2020 07:37:07 +0000
Yocto Project

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

Board description

A development board to quickly prototype on-device ML products. Scale from prototype to production with a removable system-on-module (SoM).

URL: https://coral.ai/products/dev-board/

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
zeus (3.0) | |
warrior (2.7) | |

NOTE! This integration has only be tested using the SD card as boot medium and would require additional changes to support booting from e.g eMMC.

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="zeus"

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

mkdir mender-coral && cd mender-coral

Initialize repo manifest:

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

Fetch layers in manifest:

repo sync

Setup build environment

Initialize the build environment:

. setup-environment coral

NOTE! You need to accept the Freescale EULA at ‘…/sources/meta-freescale/EULA’. Please read it and to accept it run:

echo "ACCEPT_FSL_EULA = \"1\"" >> conf/local.conf

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>"

Build for Mender demo server:

# https://docs.mender.io/getting-started/create-a-test-environment
#
# Update IP address to match the machine running the Mender demo server
MENDER_DEMO_HOST_IP_ADDRESS = "192.168.0.100"

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 tmp/deploy/images/coral-dev/.

tmp/deploy/images/coral-dev/core-image-base-coral-dev.sdimg

tmp/deploy/images/coral-dev/core-image-base-coral-dev.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 only in Standalone deployments.

References

The sources of the Yocto integration can be found in meta-mender-community/meta-mender-coral

Known issues

NOTE! This integration has only be tested using the SD card as boot medium and would require additional changes to support booting from e.g eMMC.

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!

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