Configuring BeagleBone Black to automatically flash SD card to eMMC

General Discussion
1

I’m working on updating a BeagleBone black board. With my previous image the behavior of the board was to automatically flash the SD card to the eMMC when the board boots with the SD card inserted. I’m looking to replicate that behavior using the updated official Debian 12 BeagleBone image.

The Debian12 image is working as expected when booting to the SD card. However, it does not flash to the eMMC during boot. Running the enable-beagle-flasher command as I saw in another forum post does not work, it actually causes the bootup process to freeze, with the led closest to the edge of the board remaining solidly lit with no other lights on. I was able to resolve this issue by manually editing the /boot/uEnv.txt file and removing the line “cmdline=init=/usr/sbin/init-beagle-flasher” so it seems this script is failing to execute.

I believe this issue may be related to the fact that I can’t see the eMMC when I’m booted to the SD card, using lsblk only shows the mmcblk0, which I understand is the SD card. I know that the eMMC is not faulty because if I boot the board without the SD card, it boots to the eMMC with mmcblk1, and if I then insert the SD card it properly shows in there as mmcblk0. The mmcblk1 not being available causes the command “beagle-flasher” to fail.

I’d be glad to provide any other information that would help diagnose this issue. I have access to the old flashed eMMC image and the new Debian 12 image which is only working directly from the SD card.

2

Please plug in a serial adapter on j1 so we can see what happens

Back home… so i can reply more… are you disabling the eMMC in your uEnv.txt?

Regards,

3

Hi Robert,

Thanks for your response apologies for the delay.

I’ll work on getting a serial adapter to try to see the login, would looking at the hdmi output give the same information?

I do not disable eMMC in the uEnv.txt, unless I’m misunderstanding one of the default configs. I’ve included it here as an attachment.

uEnv.txt (1.7 KB)

4

Yeap, that looks good…

These atleast are available world wide and work with many boards: https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/microcontrollers/debug-probe.html

Regards,

5

Thanks for the recommendation. The serial cable came in, I’ve attached the output from the failed boot.

The ultimate

beaglebone_bad_boot.txt (28.1 KB)
error is "kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init! exit code=0x0000200

6 
uboot_overlays: [fdt_buffer=0x60000] ...
uboot_overlays: unable to find [mmc 0:1 /lib/firmware/BB-BONE-eMMC1-01-00A0.dtbo]...
uboot_overlays: unable to find [mmc 0:1 /lib/firmware/BB-HDMI-TDA998x-00A0.dtbo]...
uboot_overlays: unable to find [mmc 0:1 /lib/firmware/BB-ADC-00A0.dtbo]...
loading /boot/initrd.img-5.10.168-ti-r72 ...

Disable enable_uboot_overlays=1 in your /boot/uEnv.txt

Regards,