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Ubuntu on Newport
This page is dedicated details regarding running Ubuntu on an Gateworks Newport Board.
See also:
- the Gateworks Ventana third party linux page for more details on how to use other linux distro on Ventana.
- Gateworks Ubuntu Page for general notes
See also:
Gateworks pre-built Ubuntu Disk Image
Gateworks provides a pre-built Ubuntu firmware images for the Newport Family:
- linux-newport.tar.xz - Compressed TAR archive of pre-built Linux kernel
- xenial-newport.tar.gz - Compressed TAR archive of Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial arm64 root filesystem (does not include kernel) (package manifest)
- xenial-newport.img.gz - Compressed Disk Image containing Firmware, Linux kernel, and Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial root filesystem. To update the firmware using this see here
Features:
- Ubuntu 16.04 aarch64 core (from debootstrap instructions)
- Gateworks Newport Linux kernel (Linux 4.14 based)
- several pre-installed packages
- eth0 dhcp
- user root passwd root
To install the kernel and root filesystem on a removable block storage device see below.
Disk Images
Gateworks releases disk images that can be easily flashed using the U-Boot Bootloader (see here). These disk images contain a partition table so they are tailored to the specific eMMC device on the boards they are intended for. Additionally they are configured for a small partition size to keep flash programming time at a minimum. This requires resizing the rootfs partition be resized in order to take advantage of the remaining flash space.
The script used to create these images can be found on GitHub here and an example usage is:
sudo ./mkimage xenial-newport 7264 1536 firmware-newport.img xenial-newport.tar.xz linux-newport.tar.xz
- The user partition of the 8GiB eMMC used on Newport is 7264MB
- We need around 1536MB of partition space for the extracted kernel and root filesystem
To flash this compressed disk image to a board see here
To install the kernel and root filesystem on a removable block storage device see linux/blockdev.
Root filesystem
A popular way to create an Ubuntu root filesystem is to use the deboostrap
utility on a Debian or Ubuntu host. This tool provides a 2-stage install where the second stage is within a chroot environment using qemu.
Requirements:
- Linux Ubuntu or Debian System with network connection and sudo permissions
Important notes:
- we set and use target and distro env variables in step 2 and use those env variables in the remaining steps to make this tutorial more version-agnostic. Please be aware of this and do not deviate from the steps unless or until you completely understand what you are doing.
Steps:
- Install pre-requisites:
sudo apt-get install qemu-user-static debootstrap binfmt-support
- Perform first stage install of minimal filesystem for
arm64
architecture:target=rootfs distro=xenial sudo debootstrap --arch=arm64 --foreign $distro $target # copy qemu-arm-static binary for the binfmt packages to find it and copy in resolv.conf from host sudo cp /usr/bin/qemu-aarch64-static $target/usr/bin
- See http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/dists/ for a list of current Ubuntu releases: 16.10=yakkety (latest), 16.04=xenial (latest LTS), 15.04=vivid, 14.10=utopic (LTS), 14.04=trusty (LTS), 12.04=precise (LTS), 10.04=lucid (LTS).
- this minimal rootfs can be considered about the same as an Ubuntu-core downloaded rootfs however it is still missing some core packages and configuration before it can be booted. These steps are taken care of in a 2nd stage install within a chroot shell
- the chroot shell below will provide network support (inherited from the host)
- we now have a minimal Ubuntu rootfs - chroot to it and perform the 2nd stage install:
sudo chroot $target # now we are in the chroot distro=xenial export LANG=C # setup second stage /debootstrap/debootstrap --second-stage
- this is the most minimal rootfs we would recommend
- (optional) add additional apt package repos:
cat <<EOT > /etc/apt/sources.list deb http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports $distro main restricted universe multiverse deb http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports $distro-updates main restricted universe multiverse deb http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports $distro-security main restricted universe multiverse EOT
- you may want to customize the above list, depending on your needs. See below for more detail on Ubuntu package feeds
- (optional) update package database and setup locales (do not skip this step if you are needing to install any packages for the steps below or otherwise)
apt-get update apt-get -f install # fixup missing package dependencies apt-get install locales dialog dpkg-reconfigure locales
- set hostname:
echo ${distro}-$(uname -m) > /etc/hostname
- set a root passwd so you can login
passwd
- or consider adding a user via
adduser
:adduser myuser usermod -a -G tty myuser # add to tty group for tty access usermod -a -G dialout myuser # add to dialout group for UART access usermod -a -G sudo myuser # add to sudo group for root access
- or consider adding a user via
- (optional) configure networking:
- wired ethernet with DHCP on eth0
cat <<EOF >> /etc/network/interfaces allow-hotplug eth0 auto eth0 iface eth0 inet dhcp EOF
- or static IP:
cat <<EOF >> /etc/network/interfaces allow-hotplug eth0 auto eth0 iface eth0 inet static address 192.168.1.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 gateway 192.168.1.254 EOF
- or wireless (requires ~3MB of additional packages):
apt-get install wpasupplicant iw cat << EOF >> /etc/network/interfaces # Wireless interface auto wlan0 iface wlan0 inet dhcp wireless_mode managed wireless_essid any wpa-driver nl80211 wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf EOF wpa_passphrase <myssid> <mypass> >> /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
- wired ethernet with DHCP on eth0
- (optional) install some useful packages
apt-get install openssh-server # ssh server for remote access apt-get install can-utils i2c-tools usbutils pciutils # cmdline tools for various hardware support
- Note that by default root ssh access is disabled for security. See below for info on enabling it
- exit the chroot shell and remove files we no longer need
exit sudo rm $target/usr/bin/qemu-arm-static
At this point you have a directory containing a root filesystem (without kernel) and likely want to install it onto removable storage or the on-board FLASH of a target board. Some intermediate formats that are useful to keep around would be a tarball, perhaps an ext4 filesystem image, or a compressed disk image suitable for flashing in the U-Boot bootloader.
To create a tarball which is the most flexible storage format and can be used for a variety of future installation uses:
sudo tar --numeric-owner -cvJf xenial-newport.tar.xz rootfs/ .
To create a 'Compressed Disk Image' using this tarball see above and to install this onto a board's embedded FLASH see here.
ext4 filesystem
If desired you can create an ext4 filesystem from the directory or tarball. This requires you choose a size for the filesystem. This size can be increased at runtime using resize2fs
as long as the partition table has room for it to grow. The advantage of using an as small as possible size is that the time necessary to flash it onto storage is reduced to a minimum (when flashing you have to write the entire ext4 fs but when formatting or resizing it only has to write periodic markers to FLASH).
For a given size (see SIZEMB variable below) you can create a rootfs with:
SIZEMB=1536 # 1.5GB - expandable later with resize2fs OUT=xenial-newport.ext4 # create a file of specific size truncate -s ${SIZEMB}M ${OUT} # format it as an ext4 filesystem mkfs.ext4 -q -F -L rootfs ${OUT} # mount it to a temporary mount point tmp_mnt=$(mktemp -d -p/tmp) mount ${OUT} ${tmp_mnt} # copy files to it cp -rup rootfs/* ${tmp_mnt} # and/or extract files from a tarball tar -C ${tmp_mnt} -xf linux-newport.tar.xz # unmount temporary mount point umount ${tmp_mnt} sync # compress it gzip -k -f ${OUT}