AXEL ULite and SBC Lynx Embedded Linux Kit (XUELK)

Info Box Applies to SBC Lynx

Introduction

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SBC Lynx Embedded Linux Kit (XUELK for short) provides all the necessary components required to set up the developing environment to:

• build the bootloader (U-Boot)
• build and run Linux operating system on SBC Lynx board
• build Linux applications that will run on the target.

The main kit components are:

• hardware platform composed of
  • TBD
• Development Managed Virtual Machine containing:
  • Toolchain
  • U-Boot bootloader sources
  • Linux kernel sources
  • Root file systems
• Technical documentation such hardware manuals, mechanical drawings, reference schematics, application notes etc.

The documents related to the software issues help the user to quickly start configuring the bootloader and the operating system, by hiding most of the complexity of the underlying hardware. For more details about SBC Lynx hardware characteristics, please refer to the SBC Lynx Hardware Manual. An account for the reserved area of DAVE Embedded Systems website is required to access the kit contents.

Kit Contents

Component	Description	Notes
	Axel Ultra SOM (or Axel Lite SOM) CPU: Freescale i.MX6 SDRAM: 2 GB DDR3 NOR: bootable SPI flash 32 MB NAND: 1GB	Please refer to Axel Ultra Hardware Manual
	AxelEVB-Lite Carrier board	Please refer to AxelEVB-Lite page
	Dacu Carrier board	Please refer to Dacu page
	Ampire AM-800480STMQW 7” 800x480 LCD display LVDS interface	Please refer to XELK Quick Start Guide
	AC/DC Single Output Wall Mount adapter Output: +12V – 2.0 A	Please refer to XELK Quick Start Guide
	DB9 Male Serial port adapter	Please refer to XELK Quick Start Guide
	MicroSDHC card with SD adapter and USB adapter	Please refer to XELK Quick Start Guide

XUELK software components

DAVE Embedded Systems adds to the latest Linux BSP from Freescale the customization required to support the SBC Lynx platform. For this reason most of the documentation provided by Freescale remains valid for the XUELK development kit. However, some customization is required, in particular at bootloader and linux kernel levels.

The following table reports the XUELK releases information.

	XUELK version
Release number	1.0.0
Release type	Major
Status	Beta
Release date	March 2016
Release notes	Ver 1.0.0
PCB version	CS214515
ConfigIDs (core/interfaces)	TBD/TBD
U-Boot version/release	TBD/TBD
Linux version/release	TBD/TBD
Drivers	TBD
Freescale BSP version	TBD
Build System	TBD

XELK microSD Layout

The microSD provided with XELK is used to store:

• A bootable partition (mmcblk0p1, vfat) containing:
  • binary images (u-boot and kernel images)
  • XELK documentation
  • XELK DVDK virtual machine image
• XELK root file system partition (mmcblk0p2, ext3)

XELK contains all the required software and documentation to start developing Linux application on the Axel platform. In particular, XELK provides a virtual machine, called DVDK, with the following features:

• VirtualBox virtual machine (.OVA archive)
• Based on Lubuntu 12.04 LTS (64-bit version)
• Pre-installed VirtualBox Guest Additions
• LXDE desktop environment
• Boot disk with the distro and pre-configured basic Linux services:
  • TFTP: with base directory /srv/tftp/
  • NFS: configured through the /etc/exports file
• Secondary disk containing source code and tools:
  • Bootloader (u-boot) source tree cloned from DAVE Embedded Systems public git repository
  • Linux kernel source tree cloned from DAVE Embedded Systems public git repository
  • External pre-built toolchain
  • Yocto bsp for AXEL
• Pre-installed Yocto-based root file systems with setup scripts, makefiles, example applications, ...
• Administrator account (dvdk) with autologin. Please note that the user account credentials are provided with the development kit (you can find them into the README file contained in the sw/dvdk folder of the kit distribution)

Please note that XELK u-boot and kernel source trees are derived from the official trees released by Freescale; these trees have been customized to add support for the Axel SOM.

XELK Updates

It's recommended to use the latest available XELK version. Please refer to Release notes for further information.

Updating git repositories

In XELK, the following source trees are clones of DAVE Embedded Systems public git repositories:

Component	GIT Remote	XELK Installation Directory
Linux	git@git.dave.eu:dave/axel/linux-2.6-imx.git	/home/dvdk/xelk/linux-2.6-imx
U-Boot	git@git.dave.eu:dave/axel/u-boot-imx.git	/home/dvdk/xelk/u-boot-imx
Yocto BSP	git@git.dave.eu:dave/axel/axel-bsp.git	/home/dvdk/xelk/axel-bsp

This means that these components can be kept in sync and up to date with DAVE Embedded Systems repositories.

RSA key generation

Please follow the procedure reported below to generate the RSA ssh key:

• select your username (ad es. username@myhost.com)
• start the DVDK and login into the virtual machine
• start a shell session
• enter the .ssh subdirectory into your home directory: cd ~/.ssh/
• launch the following command:
  

  ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "username@myhost.com" -f username@myhost.com

• this command creates the files ~/.ssh/username@myhost.com (private key) and ~/.ssh/username@myhost.com.pub (public key)
• edit your ~/.ssh/config adding the following lines:

Host git.dave.eu
    User git
    Hostname git.dave.eu
    PreferredAuthentications publickey
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/username@myhost.com

Please send the public key file to one of the following email support addresses (depending on which SOM is included in your kit version)

• support-axel@dave.eu

with the request for the creation of a new public git account associated to your username. The support team will enable the account and send you a confirmation as soon as possible.

Synchronizing the repository

When the account is enabled, you can synchronize a source tree entering the repository directory and launching the git fetch command, like in the following example:

dvdk@dvdk-vm:~$ cd /home/dvdk/xelk/linux-2.6-imx/
dvdk@dvdk-vm:/home/dvdk/xelk/linux-2.6-imx$ git fetch origin

Please note that git fetch doesn't merge the commits on the current branch. To do that, you should run

git merge origin/axel

or replace the fetch-merge process with a single git pull command. Please note that the recommended method is the fetch-merge process. For further information on Git, please refer to Git Documentation.

Release types

XELK release type can be:

• Major, when substantial changes are applied to the BSP (eg: major kernel version upgrades) or to the development kit (eg: new features, build system updates, ..). This usually means that a new DVDK is created for the XELK release
• Maintenance, when minor updates and bug fixes are introduced. This usually means that the DVDK remains the same provided with the previous major version, and only an update of the source tree repositories (and the tftp binaries) is required

As an example, XELK 2.2.0 is a maintenance release, so it provides the DVDK released with the 2.0.0 major release; customers can easily upgrade to the 2.2.0 release by updating the software components as described in Axel_Embedded_Linux_Kit_(XELK)#XELK_Updates.

Release notes

After the XELK DVDK installation, please check for updates of the source tree repositories provided with the kit, as described in XELK Updates.

XUELK 1.0.0

Notes

TBD

Known Limitations

TBD

The following table reports the known limitations of this XELK release:

Issue	Description

Quick start guide

TBD

Related Documents

TBD