I am somewhat new to the Beagle Board we are using Beagle Board xM Rev B and C. Up until now we were using some pre-built beagle board kernels but we are coming to a point where we need access to SPI, I2C buses and its looking like pre-built stuff requires patches to provide access.
In my hopeless attempts I have downloaded the repository from https://gitorious.org/beagleboard-diagnostic-kernel, x-loader boots up, u-boot works so I have done pin appropriate pin-muxing using the software available on TI’s website.
I can even compile a kernel Image but it goes as far as … Booting Kernel Image and freezes.
When I searched the issue people are saying that the environment variable for the console should be changed from ttyS2 to ttyO2, when I look at the Image that was sent with the BeagleBoard it puts the getty on ttyS2, Regardless I have chanced the environment variables to ttyO2 with no avail.
I am more then sure that it is some thing very very simple.
@Ram, I’ve found that after compiling the kernel image “uImage”, you place it at sdcard/ext3partition/boot/uImage and not at sdcard/bootpartition/uImage. The second file location doesn’t seem to be used anymore. Regarding how to compile a kernel, there are angstrom instructions, also rephrased and supplemented. I didn’t have luck with OE-made-easy because I didn’t understand the resulting directory structure. Or there are instructions for building the full Linux kernel. BTW, I’m using a Beagleboard-xM revC, so SD card only, no flash.
@Hussain, could you be more specific about what other x-loader and u-boot you used? And what files are included at I’ve successfully compiled several different kernels(Liquidware branch, Linux 3.4.1mainline, OE bitbake Angstrom) and I can confirm that each of them run because I can SSH into them over Ethernet ($ ssh root@192.168..), although none of them output to a DVI monitor and they don’t communicate via serial port because of the ttyO2/ttyS2 mismatch. The kernels also appear to hang because if I use the u-boot shell to look at the memory contents of the previous kernel boot, when my 3.4.1 kernel boots, evidently the kernel crashed at line 890 of init/main.c soon after it fails to open “/dev/console” and prints the error “Warning: unable to open an initial console.\n”.
So I tried to write a boot.scr script for the boot partition that sets the right serial port and display settings, but it appears that this boot.scr is not being executed. I also tried compiling the mainline u-boot to manually modify its default settings, but that u-boot file didn’t properly boot either. So the only x-loader and u-boot that I’ve found to work so far are ones I got via the old Narcissus system doing a simple build. Neither the OE bitbake MLO and u-boot.bin have worked, or the pre-compiled u-boot.bin in the new Narcissus build have worked for me and I don’t understand the interactions between them to know why. So Hussain, I’m really curious what other x-loader and u-boot you tried and any thoughts on what made the difference.
if you go to http://www.gitorious.org/ and search beagle board xM you will find various projects complete (one package: x-loader, u-boot, kernel and file system) or individual, However, if you are starting up what I have found best is Max Galemin project.
http://blog.galemin.com/author/mgalemin/ if you follow the instruction, depending on your computer’s speed you will be up and running in under 2 hours. Best of all its a complete project, X-loader, U-boot, kernel and file system.
This is a build root project, I find the Angstrom project a little heavy on the file system side.
I have tested this project with most of the devices, however the only catch is (as one of my other posts will show) Can’t check DVI, one of my co-workers cooked the power controller IC and myself being lazy simply removed it, which kills the power to DVI interface.