Tsimx6ul usb production

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Revision as of 16:28, 10 January 2018 by Kris (talk | contribs) (Cleaned up wording.)

The blast image and scripts require a minimum of 50 MB; this plus any disk images or tarballs used dictate the minimum disk size required. The USB drive must have at least 1 partition, with the first partition being formatted ext2/3 or fat32/vfat.

Note: The ext4 filesystem can be used instead of ext3, but it may require additional options. U-Boot does not support the 64bit addressing added as the default behavior in recent revisions of mkfs.ext4. If using e2fsprogs 1.43 or newer, the options "-O ^64bit,^metadata_csum" must be used with ext4 for proper compatibility. Older versions of e2fsprogs do not need these options passed nor are they needed for ext3.
# This assumes USB drive is /dev/sdc:
sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdc1
sudo mkdir /mnt/usb/
sudo mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/usb/
sudo tar --numeric-owner -xf /path/to/usb_blaster-latest.tar.bz2 -C /mnt/usb/

At this point, disk images or tarballs would be copied to the /mnt/usb/ folder and named as noted below. The latest disk images we provide can be downloaded from our FTP site, see the backup and restore section for links to these files. Note that the script expects images and tarballs to have specific names. When using an ext* filesystem, symlinks can be used.

The formatted USB drive boots into a small buildroot initramfs environment with filesystem and partitioning tools installed. This can be used to format SD, eMMC, or other disks. The buildroot starts up and calls /blast.sh on the USB device. By default this script is set up to look for a number of of specific files on the USB disk and write to media on the host device. Upon completion of the script the green or red LEDs will blink to visually indicate a pass or fail of the script. This script can be used without modification to write images from USB with these filenames:

SD Card sdimage.tar.bz2 Tar of the filesystem. This will repartition the SD card to 1 ext4 partition and extract this tar to the filesystem. If present, a /md5sums.txt will be checked and every file can be verified on the filesystem. This md5sums file is optional and can be omitted, but it must not be blank if present.
sdimage.dd.bz2 Disk image of the card. This will be written to mmcblk0 directly. If present a sdimage.dd.md5 will cause the written data on the SD card to be read back and verified against this checksum.
eMMC emmcimage.tar.bz2 Tar of the filesystem. This will repartition the eMMC to 1 ext4 partition and extract this tar to the filesystem. If present, a /md5sums.txt will be checked and every file can be verified on the filesystem. This md5sums file is optional and can be omitted, but it must not be blank if present.
emmcimage.dd.bz2 Disk image of the card. This will be written to mmcblk1 directly. If present a emmcimage.dd.md5 will cause the written data on the eMMC to be read back and verified against this checksum.

Most users should be able to use the above script without modification. Our buildroot sources are available from our github repo. To build the whole setup and create a USB drive, the following commands can be used. This will wipe any data on the specified partition and replace it with an ext2 formatted filesystem. This filesystem will have all of the necessary files written to it to create a bootable USB drive. Note that this must be the first partition of the disk.

# Assuming /dev/sdc1 is your usb drive's first partition
make ts4900_defconfig && make && sudo make_usb_prog.sh /dev/sdc1