BeagleBone Black

MarekBelisko
Tue, 09 Oct 2018 12:41:44 +0000
Yocto Project

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

Board description

BeagleBone Black is a low-cost, community-supported development platform for developers and hobbyists based on AM335x 1GHz ARM® Cortex-A8

URL: https://beagleboard.org/black
Wiki: https://elinux.org/Beagleboard:BeagleBoneBlack

Test results

BeagleBone Black is one of the official reference devices of Mender and is easy to get started with. This device is continuously tested as part of Mender testing pipelines which assures high quality of the integration.

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) | |
thud (2.6) | |
sumo (2.5) | |

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

Set the Yocto Project branch you are building for:

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

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

mkdir mender-beaglebone && cd mender-beaglebone

Initialize repo manifest:

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

Fetch layers from manifest:

repo sync

Next, initialize the build environment:

source setup-environment beaglebone

Building the image

Build your image by running:

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/beaglebone-yocto,

tmp/deploy/images/beaglebone-yocto/core-image-base-beaglebone-yocto.sdimg

tmp/deploy/images/beaglebone-yocto/core-image-base-beaglebone-yocto.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.

Hint: You may need to hold the Boot Button (S2) (near the SD card slot, but on the other side of the PCB) and, while holding this button, insert the USB/power lead to connect the power in order to force booting from SD card.

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 standalone mode.

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