wiki:newport/bsp

Version 20 (modified by Ryan Erbstoesser, 6 years ago) ( diff )

update image link to be generalized because now we have ubuntu bionic

  1. Newport Board Support Package (BSP)
    1. BSP Pre-Built Firmware Images
    2. BSP Source Code
    3. Building the BSP from source
    4. Building or Modifying the Linux Kernel for Newport
    5. Building Ubuntu Operating System - rootfs

Newport Board Support Package (BSP)

Gateworks provides a Board Support Package for Newport which provides source code and an easy mechanism to build different images, including Ubuntu and OpenWrt.

Gateworks uses the term 'BSP' to describe one 'image' file, that contains everything, including all boot firmware, operating system (rootfs and kernel).

The Gateworks BSP is the easiest comprehensive software process because it contains everything. If a deep dive, expert path is desired, each piece of the BSP (boot firmware, rootfs, kernel) can all be built separately.

BSP Pre-Built Firmware Images

Pre-built firmware images can be found on ​http://dev.gateworks.com/newport.

A sampling includes:

  • Entire Board Software (recommended), including boot firmware, bootloader, OS, kernel, etc:
    • ​Newport Images - Compressed Disk Image containing Firmware and kernel and OS (.img.gz files)
      • Ubuntu & OpenWrt
  • Newport GSC
  • Only Boot Firmware
  • Only Newport Kernel

Installation instructions are at the following URL: Newport Flashing Instructions

BSP Source Code

Newport Source code for the firmware, bootloader and kernel are hosted at GitHub. We highly recommend you create a GitHub account and 'Watch' these repositories to keep abreast of important feature additions, bugfixes, and firmware-releases. You can configure your GitHub account to e-mail you when changes are made to repositories ​here.

The following GitHub repos are used for Newport:

Building the BSP from source

Below are instructions for building the entire BSP, which includes all of the bootloader components and Linux kernel and Ubuntu or OpenWrt. Pre-built images are available above.

The Gateworks Newport Board Support Package uses the Google repo tool to manage multiple code repositories.

The following pre-requisites are needed to build the Newport BSP:

  • Linux Development host (desktop or laptop computer) (Ubuntu 16.04 is used by Gateworks and tested)
  • Python 2.x (required by the 'repo' tool)
  • Git (used for source code repositories)

To obtain the code:

  1. Get repo tool (download latest version of tool and put it in your path) 
    sudo apt-get install repo
  2. Initialize repo (fetch the repo manifest) 
    mkdir $HOME/newport
cd $HOME/newport
repo init -u https://github.com/Gateworks/manifest-newport.git
  3. Sync repositories (repeat this when you want to fetch the latest code updates) 
    repo sync
    • This will fetch/update the source repos described above. The first time it can take several minutes depending on your Internet connection and will take approximately ~2.5GB of disk space
  4. Setup build environment (*repeat this each time you open shell*) 
    source newport/setup-environment
  5. Build desired software target as definied below. For example: 
    make -j8 openwrt-image # build openwrt-newport.img.gz or change to any of below build targets

The build targets supported by the Newport BSP include:

  • ubuntu-image - builds ubuntu-newport.img.gz: A Compressed Disk Image which includes the 16MB Boot Firmware (BDK/ATF/U-Boot and Device-Tree images) as well as the Kernel and Ubuntu root filesystem.
  • openwrt-image - builds openwrt-newport.img.gz: A Compressed Disk Image which includes the 16MB Boot Firmware (BDK/ATF/U-Boot and Device-Tree images) as well as the OpenWrt Kernel and root filesystem
  • firmware-image - builds 'firmware-newport.img': 16MB Boot Firmware which includes the BDK/ATF/U-Boot and Device-Tree images - (takes about 2 mins on a modern development system).
  • kernel_image - builds linux-newport.tar.xz - A compressed tarball of the kernel (boot/Image) and kernel modules (lib/modules/*) which can be used on top of any compatible root filesystem

General installation instructions:

Building or Modifying the Linux Kernel for Newport

The Gateworks Newport BSP instructions above create an environment for building the Linux kernel among other targets.

Some additional instructions for common actions (make sure you have already installed the BSP and setup your shell environment as specified above):

  • Modify Kernel configuration (enabling modules etc): 
    cd linux
make newport_defconfig # start with the Newport kernel configuration
make menuconfig # modify as desired
make # build Image and modules
  • Build kernel tarball: 
    cd linux
make # build Image and modules
mkdir -p install/boot # create install and install/boot directories
cp arch/arm64/boot/Image install/boot # copy kernel Image
make INSTALL_MOD_PATH=install modules_install # install modules
tar -cvJf /tftpboot/newport/linux-newport.tar.xz --numeric-owner -C install .  # create tarball

While the resulting kernel modules must be placed on the root filesystem the kernel image must be placed in a partition readable by the U-Boot Bootloader. Therefore placing the kernel within the root filesystem as above does not work if you use a filesystem that U-Boot does not natively support (like F2FS or BTRFS for example). U-Boot only supports FAT and EXT (and UBI for NAND devices) natively.

Building Ubuntu Operating System - rootfs

You can build an entire Ubuntu image from the BSP noted above (which will boot on a Newport SBC), but it does not include building the isolated rootfs.

The actual building of the Ubuntu rootfs does not happen in the Gateworks BSP instructions described above.

Information for manually building Ubuntu rootfs can be found here: newport/ubuntu

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