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edi Project Configuration for Variscite Boards

This edi project configuration currently supports the Variscite var-som-mx8m-nano on the Symphony-Board.

var-som-mx8m-nano

Note

The master branch is experimental and currently based on Debian trixie. To get the stable Debian bookworm configuration please check out the debian_bookworm branch.

Introduction

The edi configuration contained in this repository can be used to generate the following artifacts:

  • A minimal (e.g. no display, no sound) Debian trixie arm64 (64bit) image suitable for the Variscite var-som-mx8m-nano.
  • A matching Mender update artifacts for the above configuration.
  • A Podman/Docker image with a pre-installed cross development toolchain (arm64) for C and C++.

Basic Usage

Preparation

Prior to using this edi project configuration you have to install edi according to this instructions. Please take a careful look at the "Setting up ssh Keys" section since you will need a proper ssh key setup in order to access the the target device using ssh.

The artifact generation requires some additional tools. On Ubuntu 24.04 and newer those tools can be installed as follows:

sudo apt install buildah containers-storage crun curl distrobox dosfstools e2fsprogs fakeroot genimage git mender-artifact mmdebstrap mtools parted python3-sphinx python3-testinfra podman rsync zerofree

Cloning this Repository

The edi-var project configuration contained in this git repository can be cloned as follows:

mkdir -p ~/edi-workspace/ && cd ~/edi-workspace/
git clone --recursive https://github.com/lueschem/edi-var.git

The following steps assume that you are located within the project configuration directory:

cd ~/edi-workspace/edi-var/

If the repository has already been cloned earlier, do not forget to update the submodules:

git submodule update --init

Optional: Connecting to Mender

To enable over the air (OTA) updates, the generated images are configured to connect to https://hosted.mender.io/. In order to connect to your Mender tenant you have to provide your tenant token prior to building the images. The tenant token can be added to configuration/mender/mender.yml. If you do not want to add the tenant token to the version control system you can also copy configuration/mender/mender.yml to configuration/mender/mender_custom.yml and add the tenant token there.

Creating a Target Image

A target image can be created using the following command:

edi -v project make var-som-mx8m-nano.yml

The resulting image can be copied to a SD card (here /dev/mmcblk0) using the following command (Please note that everything on the SD card will be erased!):

sudo umount /dev/mmcblk0p?
sudo dd if=artifacts/var-som-mx8m-nano.img of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=4M conv=fsync status=progress

Once you have booted the device using this SD card you can access it using ssh (the access should be granted thanks to to your ssh keys):

ssh variscite@IP_ADDRESS

The password for the user variscite is variscite (just in case you want to execute a command using sudo or login via a local terminal).

Flashing the Image to the eMMC

The same image that has been used for the SD card can also be flashed to the builtin eMMC as follows:

Copy the image to the device that has been booted from the SD card:

scp artifacts/var-som-mx8m-nano.img variscite@IP_ADDRESS:

Access the device:

ssh variscite@IP_ADDRESS

Flash the image to the eMMC (Everything on mmcblk2 will be erased!):

sudo dd if=var-som-mx8m-nano.img of=/dev/mmcblk2 bs=4M conv=fsync status=progress

Now you can switch the device off and toggle the "BOOT SELECT" switch from "SD" to "INT". When powering up the device again, it should boot the new image from the eMMC storage device.

Creating a Cross Development Container

A Podman image of a cross development container can be created using the following command:

edi -v project make var-som-mx8m-nano-cross-dev.yml

distrobox can be used to transform the image into a convenient development container:

source artifacts/var-som-mx8m-nano-cross-dev_manifest
distrobox create --image ${podman_image} --name SOME_CONTAINER_NAME --init --unshare-all --additional-packages "systemd libpam-systemd"

For all the development work the container can be entered as follows:

distrobox enter SOME_CONTAINER_NAME

You can directly start to cross compile applications:

aarch64-linux-gnu-g++ ...

For your convenience, the LXD container shares the folder edi-workspace with the host operating system.

Documenting an Artifact

During the image build the documentation gets rendered to artifacts/CONFIGNAME_documentation as reStructuredText. The text files can be transformed into a nice pdf file with some additional tools that need to be installed first:

sudo apt install texlive-latex-recommended texlive-pictures texlive-latex-extra texlive-xetex latexmk

Then the pdf can be generated using the following commands:

cd artifacts/CONFIGNAME_documentation
make PDFLATEX=xelatex latexpdf
make PDFLATEX=xelatex latexpdf

More Information

For more information about the Variscite hardware please take a look at the official documentation.

For more information about this setup please read the edi documentation and this blog post.

For details about the Mender based robust update integration please refer to this blog post.

If you are curious about the U-Boot bootloader setup please take a look at this blog post.

For the kernel build instructions please check the docs folder of this project.