Pocket Beagle 2

General Discussion
1

I bought some Pocket Beagle 2 at Mouser. As I see trump’s tariffs came into effect, it wasn’t China paying for it but me.
That is going to be complicated for boards, last time I tried to order with seeed they were asking for a tax number so I order my boards with PCWAY which is more expensive than seeed but didn’t ask for a tax number which I don’t have, that is only for companies and I don’t want to give them my social security number.

My first question has to do with the schematic, it says that there are two versions, one that defaults to SD and one to mmc.
Which one of these is the one that Mouser ships?

I will create gentoo, slackware and archlinux images for it and publish my work online.

The way I create my images is similar to what I do with archlinux. Files saved online tend to be smaller.
Basically I have a rootfs that compressed and then I use a script to create the image using losetup just like I did when I created the linux for Yamaha boats. That linux was with yocto with a DRA726.

I may do a yocto on that one later, will see. They say that it requires ubuntu which I don’t use.
I do have SuSE Linux on a minimac but not Ubuntu. I guess I could connect an external hard disk on it.
Does anyone know if yocto could work on arm64? I use my Mac Studio with debian using VMware Fusion for arm64 development. I then create the final image on my Gentoo Linux computer.

I use to do cross compiling and arch-chroot on my gentoo computer but the Mac Studio is much faster and is arm64, no cross compiling needed.

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2

don’t think any have emmc. the one i ordered only works with sdcard

3

What I meant is that on the schematic it says that there are two versions.
One where the default boot is mmc and the other one is SD.
You have to press on the switch if the default is not the one you want.
It doesn’t mean that the mmc is populated.

Just like with the first pocket beagle I plan to use a micro SD.
I guess I could use a hard disk on the USB if that works.

4

The PB’s being shipped are all set for the default boot to be the SD card.

You likely don’t want to use the USB for storage. The SD card on the PB2 is very fast (~75MB/sec) which is faster than you’ll get over the USB2 ports. I’d stick with the SD card.

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5

Good. Is the source of u-boot, kernel and instruction for the boot released yet?

6

u-boot: build order https://openbeagle.org/pocketbeagle/u-boot-pocketbeagle2

Prebuilt version of u-boot, to help verify your u-boot builds. https://openbeagle.org/beagleboard/boot-firmware

Kernel: v1 submitted for mainline, V2 will go after rc1 next weekends.

7

Once I have the information for the Kernel I will create a Slackware and Arch Linux version for it.
As I have done for my Beagleplay Slackware image I will document it on my website.

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8

I am having issues with Archlinux. I may have to recreated the kernel in chroot using a modified PKGBUILD from archlinux. For some reason they do not load any module. Perhaps something to do with that crap called systemd. I don’t use it in Slackware and Gentoo which works with no issue.

I think that the solution might be to do EFI boot. I need to figure out how to do that with the beagleplay. If I can get the Fedora version to work I may able to use it as an example, they seem only support EFI boot.