Unable to enable SPI1 on BeagleBone Black (Debian 12 Bookworm - Kernel 6.12)

General Discussion
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1

Hello, I’m trying to enable SPI1 on a BeagleBone Black to flash a T400 BIOS, but I’ve hit a wall with the latest Debian 12 image.

System Details:

  • Image: BeagleBoard.org Debian Bookworm Base Image 2025-05-27

  • Kernel: 6.12.28-bone25

  • Hardware: BeagleBone Black Rev C

What I have tried so far:

  1. I installed the bb-cape-overlays package, but the /lib/firmware/ directory still doesn’t contain BB-SPIDEV1-00A0.dtbo. It seems the package doesn’t provide the expected binaries for this kernel version.

  2. I attempted to manually compile the .dts sources found in /opt/source/ using dtc, but it fails with syntax errors.

  3. I added enable_uboot_overlays=1 and uboot_overlay_addr4=/lib/firmware/BB-SPIDEV1-00A0.dtbo to uEnv.txt, but after rebooting, /dev/spidev1.0 is still missing.

  4. config-pin is not available on this image, and the pins remain in GPIO mode according to show-pins.

What is the correct way to enable SPIDEV1 on this specific 2025-05-27 Base Image? Are the compiled overlays stored in a different location or repository for the 6.12.x kernels?

2

First run…

sudo apt update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Then reboot..

Next…

cd /opt/source/dtb-6.12.x/
make clean
git pull
./build_n_install.sh

Then set: uEnv.txt

enable_uboot_overlays=1
uboot_overlay_addr4=BB-SPIDEV1-00A0.dtbo

Reboot..

Then verify with sudo beagle-version

Regards,

3

Thank you, it worked. I’m so grateful!