Running Fedora 14 on the SheevaPlug from a SD card

This SheevaPlug has the following specs:

Upgrade u-boot

Follow the instructions here.

In addition to the above, you should set and save the following:

Marvell> setenv mainlineLinux yes
Marvell> setenv arcNumber 2097
Marvell> saveenv

I'm not using swap and just created a single partition on the card: /dev/mmcblk0p1

Create a filesystem on the card. I'm using ext4.

# mkfs.ext4 -L fedoraarm /dev/<sd_card_root>

Prevent periodic fsck's at mount.

# tune2fs -c 0 /dev/<sd_card_root>

Next put the Fedora 14 rootfs onto the card. You can get the rootfs from here.

# cd /mnt/<sd_card_root>
# tar -xvpf /path/to/f14-rootfs-2011-06-23.tar.bz2

Grab current kernel images/modules from here.
Put the config, uImage and System.map into /boot on the sd card.
Untar the modules from the root of the sd card.

Put the SD card into the SheevaPlug.

From the u-boot/Marvell prompt load the kernel image into memory, there are numerous ways of doing this. We'll use tftp.

Marvell> setenv serverip 192.168.1.2
Marvell> setenv ipaddr 192.168.1.3
Marvell> tftpboot 0x6400000 sheeva-3.0.4-uImage

Change the above accordingly.

From here we can write the kernel image into the NAND.

Marvell> nand erase 0x100000 0x400000
Marvell> nand write 0x6400000 0x100000 0x400000

WARNING: Using the wrong values here can render your device un-bootable.
See here for a means to fix it.

You can elect to not write the kernel to NAND here and instead write it from under Linux once booted.

Set the various boot environment variables.

Marvell> setenv bootargs_console console=ttyS0,115200
Marvell> setenv bootargs_root 'root=/dev/mmcblk0p1 ro rootfstype=ext4 rootwait'

If you wrote the kernel into NAND as above, then you can also do this:

Marvell> setenv bootcmd 'setenv bootargs $(bootargs_console) $(bootargs_root); nand read 0x6400000 0x100000 0x400000; bootm 0x6400000'

If not, then do this:

Marvell> setenv bootcmd 'setenv bootargs $(bootargs_console) $(bootargs_root); bootm 0x6400000'

Then

Marvell> saveenv
Marvell> boot

Once booted. If you didn't write the kernel into NAND above, then do it here:. You'll need the mtd-utils package.

# flash_eraseall /dev/mtd1
# nandwrite -p /dev/mtd1 /boot/sheeva-3.0.4-uImage

WARNING: You should double check that /dev/mtd1 is the uImage partition, by inspecting the contents of /proc/mtd

You should then go back to u-boot and set the first bootcmd variable and save it.

Andrew Clayton; Sun Oct 2, 2011