Prebuilt Linux Distribution for ARC HS Development Kit (HSDK), 2018.01

This is release 2018.01 of the Linux distribution for the ARC HS Development Kit (HSDK) board, v1.0. This distribution contains prebuilt binaries ready to download and execute to quickly get up and running on the ARC HSDK platform.

This release was built using upstream Buildroot version 2017.11.

Please consult ARC Linux wiki for additional information on linux usage with ARC Development Platforms.

Updates since RC1

• Minor fixes for U-Boot bootloader and Linux kernel
  Note that all pre-built binaries and images were regenerated. So for better results please re-deploy sdcard.img on your micro SD-card to make sure everything is up to date.

Installation

Prebuilt software in this release comes in the form of an microSD-card image containing all required software, including uImage, root file system as well as U-Boot environment. To deploy that image on microSD-card:

• On Linux hosts, use dd command as follows: sudo dd if=sdcard.img of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1M, note it is required to first make sure no partitions of this SD-card is mounted currently, otherwise results of dd command will be overridden by previous contents of the card producing completely unexpected results.
• On Windows hosts, use "Win32 Disk Imager" utility, available here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/
  Once the image is deployed on microSD-card, just insert it in the microSD-card slot of the HSDK and reset the board.
  Note DIP-switch BIM should be in 1:off, 2:on state while both BMC and BCS should be in 1: on, 2:on state.

Key Components

• Linux kernel v4.14.7
• U-Boot bootloader based on 2017.11 with custom patches (to be included in future upstream U-Boot release)
• ARC GNU Tools v2017.09 (uclibc toolchain version)

Supported Peripherals

• SD-card
• Gigabit Ethernet
• USB 1.1 and 2.0
• SPI serial flash (support limited to U-Boot bootloader)
• HDMI video output via external USB-to-HDMI converters based on DisplayLink USB 2.0 chips

Prebuilt Root File System Contents

• GDB (both server and target gdb)
• MPlayer
• OpenSSH (both server and client parts)
• RT-tests
• iperf3
• Framebuffer test application
• perf (Linux tools)
• Bonnie++

Download Files Description

hsdk.dtb - device tree blob for HSDK
rootfs.tar - tarball of root filesystem contents
sdcard.img - image file to be written to SD-card
u-boot - Elf file containing U-Boot bootloader for use with debugger on host computer via JTAG.
u-boot.bin - binary image containing U-Boot bootloader for programming to on-board SPI flash (without prebootloader-specific header, so it won't be found by the prebootloader).
u-boot.head - binary image containing U-Boot bootloader for programming to on-board SPI flash (note prebootloader-specific header is appended so image is really ready to be programmed in the flash).
uboot.env - binary including U-Boot environment variables guarded by checksum, please don't edit manually.
uImage - binary image containing both Linux kernel and initramfs for use with U-Boot bootloader.
vmlinux - Elf file containing both Linux kernel and initramfs for use with debugger on host computer via JTAG.

How to reproduce prebuilt artifacts

1. Download tarball with sources of Buildroot from this tag:

# wget https://github.com/foss-for-synopsys-dwc-arc-processors/buildroot/archive/arc-2017.11-hsdk-release.tar.gz

2. Extract sources from tarball:

# tar xzf arc-2017.11-hsdk-release.tar.gz
# cd buildroot-arc-2017.11-hsdk-release/

3. Configure Buildroot:

# make snps_hsdk_defconfig

4. Build everything. All built artifacts will be available in output/images folder:

# make

# ls -1 output/images/                                                  
boot.vfat
hsdk.dtb
rootfs.ext2
rootfs.ext4
sdcard.img
sdcard.img.gz
u-boot
u-boot.bin
uboot.env
u-boot.head
uImage