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Booting From Usb Otg Port

Abstract

Here we provide a simple way to boot linux from USB OTG port. It's very useful when our system get damaged somehow. We may be able to fix it by accessing to the storeage, e.g. nand, sata, or SD Card, and making some repair to the config or filesystem.

Host Enviroment

Ubuntu 12.04 x86_64

Step-by-step

Download all we need $wget http://dl.cubieboard.org/software/a20-cubietruck/common/usbboot-fel.tar.gz $tar -zxvf usbboot-fel.tar.gz

to check the md5sum(optional)

$wget http://dl.cubieboard.org/software/a20-cubietruck/common/usbboot-fel.tar.gz.md5 $ md5sum usbboot-fel.tar.gz f09f92833dc419207c7c9cd71ad65cc4 usbboot-fel.tar.gz $ cat usbboot-fel.tar.gz.md5 f09f92833dc419207c7c9cd71ad65cc4 usbboot-fel.tar.gz

Enter FEL Mode

FEL is a low-level subroutine containing in the BootROM on allwinner devices. It is used for provisioning and recovery of devices using USB. When the chip goes to FEL mode, the chip will be waiting for communication from PC though USB. The primary purpose for FEL is for flashing the NAND with the PC tool LiveSuit. For more detailed please refer to FEL MODE

To enter FEL mode here:

1. Power off the device 2. Press and hold FEL key 3. Press and hold power key for about 2s (power on the device, when powering on, if a key is

pressed, the devices will not boot until key released)

After entering FEL mode, we suggest you to plug in AC adapter if you have SATA drive on board, avoiding low current from USB.

Upload Images $cd usbboot-fel

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$ ./usb-boot ./u-boot-spl.bin ./u-boot.bin ./uImage ./script.bin ./initramfs.img fel write 0x2000 ./u-boot-spl.bin fel exe 0x2000 fel write 0x4a000000 ./u-boot.bin fel write 0x41000000 ./bin/ramboot.scr fel write 0x43000000 ./script.bin fel write 0x44000000 ./uImage fel write 0x4c000000 ./initramfs.img fel exe 0x4a000000

Tips

Setting GMAC

udhcpc

default user and password

root/root

Change to VGA output

$cd usbboot-fel/ $ ls adb-devprobe.sh bin2fex fel fex2bin initramfs.img pio u-boot.bin uImage bin bootinfo fel-gpio fexc nand-part script.bin u-boot-spl.bin usb-boot ./bin2fex script.bin 1.fex fexc-bin: script.bin: version: 0.1.2 fexc-bin: script.bin: size: 46472 (85 sections) vim 1.fex (here change the output type ./fex2bin 1.fex script.bin

Customizing

Replace fel/usb-boot

The fel/usb-boot in this manual is X86_64bit version. If you want to use it under I386 or even arm platform, you need to compile the tools by yourself. fel/usb-boot are part of sunxi-tools, and the latest source code can be found at http://github.com/linux-sunxi/sunxi-tools.git.

Getting Source Code

$git clone git://github.com/linux-sunxi/sunxi-tools.git

Compiling

$cd sunxi-tools $make

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and then replace the tools with the one you built

initramfs.img

Refer to http://github.com/hno/miniroot

See Also

http://linux-sunxi.org/FEL http://linux-sunxi.org/FEL/USBBoot

Cb3 A20-android System Boot From Sata

Copy the System File

At first , connect Cubietruck by USB ,and open terminal:

$adb shell

So you will input the Android-Shell Command-Line,and see where the system file mounted:

$mount

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You can see the block /dev/block/system mount on /system,

then you connect SATA with Cubietruck,and see what block is the SATA:

$ls /sys/devices/platform/sw_ahci.0/ata1/host0/target0:0:0/0:0:0:0/block

You will see the SATA block(maybe it's sdb, sdc or sdd,but it's no problem):

Now you know the block,use this command:

$dd if=/dev/block/system of=/dev/block/sda(Your SATA block)

Just wait for about 1 minutes,it will success:

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Modify the SDK

After you copy the system file to SATA,you should modify SDK:

$cd /ct-droid1/android42/devices/softwinner/sugar-cubietruck/ && ls $vim init.sun7i.rc

And "mount ext4 /dev/block/system" changes to "mount ext4 /dev/block/sda",like that:

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Save and quit,complie the android image.If you don't konw how to complie,refer to here

After compile success,do this:

Install the new image to Cubietruck.

Connect the SATA first( must first! If you don't do this it wouldn't boot)

Charge it with electricity,you will see it Boot from SATA.

Cb3 A20-install Nand Boot Android For Cubietruck

Install Livesuit or PhoenixSuit

All sunxi devices use LiveSuit as a default flasher and updater for retail customer and PhoenixCard or PhoenixUSB for flashing when devices are manufactured. LiveSuit/Phoenix protocol and data are closed-source standrad used by many companies and devices.

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Please note that PhoenixSuit is actually LiveSuit2.0. There are different platform's PhoenixSuit

1. Windows 2. Linux i386 3. Linux x86_64 4. Mac

Please refer to the Livesuit/PhoenixSuit Installation Guide

Download Image

Assuming you are going to use ct-nand-v1.01-20140109.img

$wget http://dl.cubieboard.org/software/a20-cubietruck/android/ct-nand-v1.01-20140109.img.gz $gzip -d ct-nand-v1.01-20140109.img.gz

Press the FEL key when power up(the FEL key is the one under the USB OTG port), The CPU

automatically enters FEL mode. Livesuit will start to write the image to Nand on board.

Cb3 A20-compiling Android Image For Cubietruck

Download the source code $mkdir cubietruck-android && cd cubietruck-android $wget http://dl.cubieboard.org/software/a20-cubieboard/android/A20-android-4.2.tar.xz $tar -xvf A20-android-4.2.tar.xz

Compiling image

After get the source code,you could use common to build it as follow:

Build Linux kernel $cd lichee/ $cp linux-3.3/arch/arm/configs/cubietruck_defconfig linux-3.3/arch/arm/configs/sun7ismp_android_defconfig $./build.sh -p sun7i_android

Start Building:

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Success Building:

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Build Android image $cd ../android42 $source build/envsetup.sh $lunch 16 (select sugar_cubietruck-eng) $extract-bsp $make -j8

Finish building:

Pack Final image:

$pack

Pack success:

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Install image

The final image is at /lichee/tools/pack/sun7i_android_sugar-cubietruck.img

You can use Livesuit to install it

Lubuntu Desktop/Server SD Card Installation for Cubietruck

Abstract

We may want to install lubuntu desktop/server to SD card, here is a guide for you. This guide is for Linux platform only. We take Desktop as a example in this guide. If you are interested in Server, just replace the images with server one.

Prerequisites

Any Linux environment, we want fdisk, dd, tar, wget commands An SD Card(at least 2GB)

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Installation

We assume card=/dev/sdd here

Get Images

Name Desc URL

u-boot u-boot with spl download

bootfs uImage, uEnv.txt, script.bin download

rootfs rootfs download

Cleaning SD Card $card=/dev/sdd $sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=${card} bs=1024 seek=544 count=128

Make Bootable SD Card $sudo dd if=u-boot-sunxi-with-spl-ct-20131102.bin of=$card bs=1024 seek=8

Partitioning $ sudo fdisk $card

Using the fdisk command to create 2 partitions on the SD Card, e.g.

1st partitions start from 2048 sectors, 64MB in size 2nd partitions just keep it all default

Show bellow

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdd1 2048 133119 65536 83 Linux /dev/sdd2 133120 15278079 7572480 83 Linux

Also we recommend you to look at Bootable_SD_card

$sudo mkfs.ext2 ${card}1 $sudo mkfs.ext4 ${card}2

Copying $mkdir /tmp/sdd1 /tmp/sdd2 $sudo mount -t ext2 ${card}1 /tmp/sdd1 $sudo mount -t ext4 ${card}2 /tmp/sdd2 $sudo tar -C /tmp/sdd1 -xvf bootfs-part1.tar.gz $sudo tar -C /tmp/sdd2 -xvf rootfs-part2.tar.gz $sync $sudo umount /tmp/sdd1 $sudo umount /tmp/sdd2

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Customizing ( optional )

Change your own kernel

Move Rootfs to Hard Drive

Mount rootfs partitions

After login to lubuntu system on Cubietruck with linaro,

$sudo su - root --> change to root user #mkdir /tmp/1 /tmp/target #mount /dev/mmcblk0p2 /tmp/1 #mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1 #mount /dev/sda1 /tmp/target

Moving rootfs

#(cd /tmp/1; tar --backup -c *) |tar -C /tmp/target -xv

Changing Kernel Parameters

#mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /mnt/ #vi /mnt/uEnv.txt (Change root=/dev/sda1)

So the file's content would like bellow

cat /mnt/uEnv.txt root=/dev/sda1 extraargs=console=tty0 hdmi.audio=EDID:0 disp.screen0_output_mode=EDID:1280x720p50 rootwait panic=10 rootfstype=ext4 rootflags=discard

Sync to disk, and reboot to your hard drive

#sync #umount /mnt #reboot

After installing rootfs to SSD, we will get much more better experience.

Performance (R:106MB/s, W: 148MB/s)

root@cubietruck:~# cat /sys/block/sda/device/model SAMSUNG SSD 830 root@cubietruck:~# dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/dev/null bs=1M count=10000 10000+0 records in 10000+0 records out 10485760000 bytes (10 GB) copied, 98.9637 s, 106 MB/s root@cubietruck:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb2 bs=1M count=5000

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dd: writing `/dev/sdb2': No space left on device 913+0 records in 912+0 records out 956919808 bytes (957 MB) copied, 6.45456 s, 148 MB/s

Tips

VGA output

If we want to change to VGA output default, we need to modify the script.bin at the 1st partition

$bin2fex script.bin 1.fex $vim 1.fex (and change screen0_output_type to 4) $fex2bin 1.fex script.bin

Kernel Source

http://github.com/cubieboard/linux-sunxi (cubie/sunxi-3.4 branch)

Wifi Module

Cubietruck have AP6210 wifi/bt module combo on board, to load the module,

#modprobe bcmdhd

Default User/Password linaro/linaro