There is no installer (anaconda) for Fedora on ARM systems yet, so installation means downloading an image of the root filesystem and a kernel. The root filesystem is generic for all ARM (v5 and newer) systems so it does not include a kernel.
Download the root filesystem and kernel onto your host machine with an SD card reader.
wget http://scotland.proximity.on.ca/fedora-arm/beta/f13/rootfs-f13-beta-2011-03-23.tar.bz2
wget http://scotland.proximity.on.ca/arm/kernel/pandaboard/2.6.35.3/boot.zip
wget http://scotland.proximity.on.ca/arm/kernel/pandaboard/2.6.35.3/boot_no_vid.tar.gz
wget http://scotland.proximity.on.ca/arm/kernel/pandaboard/2.6.35.3/uImage_configLinks from http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/F13-ARM-Beta2
Next, the filesystem and the kernel need to be copied to an SD(HC) card. The SD card should have a small FAT32 partition at the beginning to hold the kernel, and the rest of the card can be a regular Linux ext3 filesystem.
After inserting the SD card in the reader, I can see from the dmesg logs the
device name:
$ dmesg
...
[ 277.436513] mmc0: new SDHC card at address 0007
[ 277.536720] mmcblk0: mmc0:0007 SD08G 7.43 GiB
[ 277.541804] mmcblk0: p1
...This script from omappedia.org will do the trick; many thanks to the folks in #pandaboard on freenode IRC for helping me get the SD card formatted correctly!
#!/bin/sh
DRIVE=$1
dd if=/dev/zero of=$DRIVE bs=1024 count=1024
SIZE=`fdisk -l $DRIVE | grep Disk | awk '{print $5}'`
echo DISK SIZE - $SIZE bytes
CYLINDERS=`echo $SIZE/255/63/512 | bc`
echo CYLINDERS - $CYLINDERS
{
echo ,9,0x0C,*
echo ,,,-
} | sfdisk -D -H 255 -S 63 -C $CYLINDERS $DRIVE
mkfs.vfat -F 32 -n "boot" ${DRIVE}p1
mke2fs -j -L "rootfs" ${DRIVE}p2NOTE: If your system shows the device as /dev/sda1 (or similar), then you will need to remove the 'p' from the last two lines, e.g.,
mkfs.vfat -F 32 -n "boot" ${DRIVE}1
Format the device using the above script and then take a look at it with parted:
$ sudo ./sd-card-format.sh /dev/mmcblk0 ...
$ sudo parted /dev/mmcblk0 print
Model: SD SD08G (sd/mmc)
Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 7986MB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 32.3kB 74.0MB 74.0MB primary fat32 boot, lba
2 74.0MB 7979MB 7904MB primary ext3That looks better!
Okay, now I can extract the filesystem onto the SD card. Mount the second partition onto a /mnt/panda-rootfs directory.
$ sudo mkdir /mnt/panda-rootfs
$ sudo mount /dev/mmcblk0p2 /mnt/panda-rootfs
$ cd /mnt/panda-rootfs && sudo tar xf ~/Download/arm-f13-beta2/rootfs-f13-beta-2011-03-23.tar.bz2
Finally, the kernel can be extracted into the first partition:
$ sudo mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /mnt/panda-rootfs/boot
$ cd /mnt/panda-rootfs && sudo unzip ~/Download/arm-f13-beta2/kernel/pandaboard/2.6.35.3/boot.zip
Archive: ~/Download/arm-f13-beta2/kernel/pandaboard/2.6.35.3/boot.zip
inflating: boot/boot.scr
inflating: boot/MLO
inflating: boot/u-boot.bin
inflating: boot/uImageA quick check to see that both partitions have some used space:
$ df -Th /mnt/panda-rootfs /mnt/panda-rootfs/boot
Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mmcblk0p2
ext3 7.3G 549M 6.4G 8% /mnt/panda-rootfs
/dev/mmcblk0p1
vfat 120M 2.8M 117M 3% /mnt/panda-rootfs/bootThere's a known bug with launching a getty on the PandaBoard. For now, edit the /etc/rc.d/rc.local file and uncomment the "horrible hack":
$ sudo vim /mnt/panda-rootfs/etc/rc.d/rc.local
# horrible hack to respawn serial console
while true
do
/sbin/agetty -L 115200 console vt100
doneFinally, unmount and remove the SD card and transfer it to the PandaBoard.
$ cd && sudo umount /mnt/panda-rootfs/boot && sudo umount /mnt/panda-rootfs && sudo syncThe PandaBoard is set up to use a serial console, so attach a serial cable (or a USB-to-serial cable with a Prolific PL2303 chip) and fire up minicom. I'm using a USB-to-serial cable, so I ran 'minicom -s' to configure it for /dev/ttyUSB0. With minicom running, I finally attached the power cable to the PandaBoard and watched it boot.
Texas Instruments X-Loader 1.4.4ss (Mar 1 2011 - 23:55:13)
Reading boot sector
Loading u-boot.bin from mmc
U-Boot 2011.03-rc1 (Feb 09 2011 - 01:46:42)
CPU : OMAP4430
Board: OMAP4 Panda
I2C: ready
DRAM: 1 GiB
MMC: OMAP SD/MMC: 0
Using default environment
In: serial
Out: serial
Err: serial
Hit any key to stop autoboot: 0
reading boot.scr
...
...
...
Fedora release 13 (Goddard)
Kernel 2.6.35-g6d019da-dirty on an armv7l (console)
fedora-arm login: root
Password:
Last login: Sat Jan 1 00:41:17 on console
[root@fedora-arm ~]# cat /proc/cpuinfo
Processor : ARMv7 Processor rev 2 (v7l)
processor : 0
BogoMIPS : 1195.29
processor : 1
BogoMIPS : 1166.88
Features : swp half thumb fastmult vfp edsp thumbee neon vfpv3
CPU implementer : 0x41
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant : 0x1
CPU part : 0xc09
CPU revision : 2
Hardware : OMAP4430 Panda Board
Revision : 0020
Serial : 0000000000000000It works!
Next up, networking...
