Uli Nichtder Posted September 23, 2018 Posted September 23, 2018 Hi, I just got a mini ITX Board for just 20 bucks, with PCIe x1 Slot, an M.2 Slot and a miniPCIe Slot - okay, only 1 Gig of Ram and only dualcore, but hey... Advantech Freescale RSB-6410 NXP ARM® Cortex®-A9 i.MX6 Dual/Quad Mini-ITX Motherboard Manufacturer Dropbox Images Wiki Page... I thought, how hard can it be to bootstream armbian/debian on this device, but despite chroot'ing into debian I did not really succseed and stuck in a really (!) crappy Yocto Linux environment without any packet manager and crappiest QT Interface you can think of... In the Dropbox folder of the manufacturer there are a couple of sd card images, but everything I try does not boot, or boots into a "non screen" Environment (core-image-full-cmdline-imx6qrsb6410a2-20180809071407.rootfs.sdcard - seems that there is only console via Serial) or a slightly newer kerne (4.15) again in combination with a terrible, tool-less Yocto QT GUI (fsl-image-qt5-imx6qrsb6410a2-20180809063135.rootfs.sdcard) - the other files don't boot at all... Nevertheless, armbian/debian has to be installed... Since this Board is not supported out of the box yet, could someone tell me how to adapt the already released i.MX6 builds to this board? I got the whole environment saved and especially the dtb file for this board is also saved. Would be nice if someone could help me roughly which steps are mandatory for adding this board to the build environmet. I am not new to linux, but I am new to adding hardware-platforms to anything :-) Thanks a lot! Cheers, P.S.: Anyone who has asked himlself why the InFlight Entertainment in many planes is slow, crappy and freezes suddenly should take a look at yocto with qt5.... the demos delivered with the yocto thingie reminds me of the QNX 3,5" Demo Disk of the late 1990ies with a RTOS and a Webbrowser on it - but, the QNX Demo Disk was faster, and better in any way :-)
Igor Posted September 24, 2018 Posted September 24, 2018 11 hours ago, Uli Nichtder said: how hard can it be to bootstream It depends. Supported boards get huge input from several people on many levels. I am involved in already too many boards which means I will not explore in details but will only provide you with some general tips. If you want to make use of our build system to build a bootable image, you need to: - have working u-boot. Ideally, if there is mainline support. Probably it is not. You might need to fiddle with u-boot scripts to make it compatible with our standard way of booting. - you need to extract DTB used in a current best Linux (4.15.y) for this board and add it with a patch to our cubox-i kernel source which are mainline kernels + patches for cubox-i, some are generic for imx6. Our NEXT branch is 4.14.y, while DEV is 4.18.y ... both might require some DT adaptations. If you get lucky, this can lead you to the booting Armbian image, but probably not many things will work out of the box ... next possible further DT adjustments. To be able to put those things together you will have to get familiar with a build system. Mostly on your own. Even I would like to help you more, I don't have this luxury. Peek also here https://github.com/150balbes/build as an example how a build system is used to create images for 3rd party hardware. Good luck.
umiddelb Posted September 24, 2018 Posted September 24, 2018 I own another imx6 based device (utilite pro) which doesn't boot the armbian image for the cubox-i out of the box. After some bisects I've found a common mainline kernel configuration for both of them. The mainline kernel comes with device tree source files for various imx6 based boards, but obviously not for yours, so you are bound to the kernel releases issued by advantech. If you have a more or less working setup (i.e. u-boot boots up a kernel from a certain root device and the kernel is able load its modules && you can watch this from your serial console), then you may replace the existing userland by something different of your choice.
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