The Kyu project

January 8, 2023

BSD TCP/IP for Kyu - inventory of my BBB units

This is clearly a diversion from TCP work, but now that I have tracked down all (or most) of my units, I am taking time to inventory and evaluate them. I also found my collection of BBB SD cards.

Note that some BBB have 2G of eMMC and others have 8G. This was a production change when 2G eMMC parts became unavailable. All BBB units have 512M of ram.

A - 2G unit, boots Debian 2015
B - in focus controller, boots some linux.
C - 2G unit, reflashed debian console, boots Kyu
D - 2G unit, flashed w/ debian console, boots Kyu from eMMC!
E - 2G unit, flashed w/ debian console, boots Kyu over network
F - 2G unit, reflashed debian console, boots Debian
G - donated to AJ for his Gershwin MFM
H - a BBG unit, 4G emmc, boots Kyu, 192.168.0.130
bricked unit from AJ
white (ancient and very different)
2 units: PocketBeagle

Unit C

This is the "slow" unit that runs the 2013 U-Boot which does not enable cache.

I insert an SD card that will boot a console Debian. Then:

fdisk /dev/mmcblk1
Disk /dev/mmcblk1: 1920 MB, 1920991232 bytes
        Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/mmcblk1p1   *          63      144584       72261    c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/mmcblk1p2          144585     3743144     1799280   83  Linux

So this is one of the older units with 2G of emmc. I halt the system, replace the SD card with the "flasher" and boot it up. It requires no interaction. After about 5 minutes in announces that it is powering off, and it does. All done. I remove the SD card and boot it up.
It announces:

U-Boot 2015.10-00001-g51aa16b (Oct 21 2015 - 14:16:21 -0500)

I login as root with no password. I create /uEnv.txt as follows:

optargs=quiet
uenvcmdx=echo Booting via tftp (BBBC); setenv saloadaddr 0x80000000; setenv ipaddr 192.168.0.37; setenv serverip 192.168.0.5; tftpboot ${saloadaddr} bbb-c.bin; go ${saloadaddr}
uenvcmd=run uenvcmdx

I sync and reboot. It does boot Kyu in a reasonable amount of time. It fails to find symbols. It decides it is My IP = 192.168.0.61. Ping fails as does other network testing. But it is no longer slow.

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Kyu / tom@mmto.org