Bootlin releases OpenWrt support for STM32MP1 platforms

OpenWrt logoA few years ago, as part of its collaboration with ST, Bootlin developed and released buildroot-external-st, a project offering the integration of the support for ST’s STM32MP1 platform with the popular Buildroot build system, as an alternative to the Yocto Project offering provided directly by ST.

Today, Bootlin is happy to announce the openwrt-feed-st project, which in a similar way, provides integration of ST’s STM32MP1 platforms with the OpenWrt build system. This work was done by Bootlin’s OpenWrt expert Thomas Richard.

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Updated Buildroot support for STM32MP1 platforms, ST BSP v5.0

We continue the support of the buildroot-external-st project as presented in our first announce, which is an extension of the Buildroot build system with ready-to-use configurations for the STMicroelectronics STM32MP1 platforms. We already published several updates of this support, with the LTS 2022.02 and version 4.0 of ST BSP version update and the LTS 2022.02.7 and version 4.1 of ST BSP version update.

More specifically, this project is a BR2_EXTERNAL repository for Buildroot, with a number of defconfigs that allow to quickly build embedded Linux systems for the STM32MP1 Discovery Kit platforms. It’s a great way to get started with Buildroot on those platforms.

Today, we are happy to announce an updated version of this project, published under the branch st/2023.02.10 at https://github.com/bootlin/buildroot-external-st. This new version brings a number of additional features:

Continue reading “Updated Buildroot support for STM32MP1 platforms, ST BSP v5.0”

Updated Buildroot support for STM32MP1 platforms, ST BSP v4.1

Back in December 2021, we announced the buildroot-external-st project, which is an extension of the Buildroot build system with ready-to-use configurations for the STMicroelectronics STM32MP1 platforms. Later on, in July 2022, we updated it to the lastest Buildroot LTS 2022.02 and version 4.0 of ST BSP version.

More specifically, this project is a BR2_EXTERNAL repository for Buildroot, with a number of defconfigs that allow to quickly build embedded Linux systems for the STM32MP1 Discovery Kit platforms. It’s a great way to get started with Buildroot on those platforms.

Today, we are happy to announce an updated version of this project, published under the branch st/2022.02.7 at https://github.com/bootlin/buildroot-external-st. This new version brings the following changes:

Continue reading “Updated Buildroot support for STM32MP1 platforms, ST BSP v4.1”

Updated Buildroot support for STM32MP1 platforms

Back in December 2021, we had announced the buildroot-external-st project, which is an extension of the Buildroot build system with ready-to-use configurations for the STMicroelectronics STM32MP1 platforms.

More specifically, this project is a BR2_EXTERNAL repository for Buildroot, with a number of defconfigs that allows to quickly build embedded Linux systems for the STM32MP1 Discovery Kit platforms. It’s a great way to get started with Buildroot on those platforms.

Today, we are happy to announce an updated version of this project, published under the branch st/2022.02 at https://github.com/bootlin/buildroot-external-st. This new version brings the following changes:

  • Updated to work with Buildroot 2022.02, the current LTS version of Buildroot
  • Updated to use the 4.0 “ecosystem” from ST, which means we’re using updated BSP components from ST, namely Linux 5.15, U-Boot 2021.10, TF-A 2.6 and OP-TEE 3.16
  • New defconfigs have been added to support all variants of the STM32MP157 Discovery Kits: STM32MP157A-DK1 and STM32MP157D-DK1, as well as STM32MP157C-DK2 and STM32MP157F-DK2.
  • The minimal defconfigs now use OP-TEE as BL32 instead of the minimal monitor provided by TF-A, called SP-MIN
  • The minimal defconfigs now have mdev enabled, to benefit from automatic kernel module loading
  • The demo defconfigs now have the Dropbear SSH server enabled

The document available on the Github page details how to use this work, but here is a quick start in just a few steps:

  1. Retrieve Buildroot itself, a branch containing a few patches on top of upstream 2022.02 is needed
    $ git clone -b st/2022.02 https://github.com/bootlin/buildroot.git
  2. Retrieve buildroot-external-st
    $ git clone -b st/2022.02 https://github.com/bootlin/buildroot-external-st.git
  3. Go into the Buildroot directory
    $ cd buildroot/
  4. Configure Buildroot, for example here the demo configuration for the STM32MP157F-DK2
    $ make BR2_EXTERNAL=../buildroot-external-st st_stm32mp157f_dk2_demo_defconfig
  5. Run the build
    $ make
  6. Flash the resulting SD card image available at output/images/sdcard.img and boot your board!

If you have any question or issue, feel free to use the Github issue tracker to contact us. Bootlin is an ST Authorized Partner, and can provide engineering and training services around embedded Linux on STM32MP1 platforms.

Announcing buildroot-external-st, Buildroot support for STM32MP1 platforms

STM32MP1 Discovery Kit 2Back in 2019, ST released a brand new processor family, the STM32MP1, whose members are currently based on a dual Cortex-A7 to run Linux combined with one Cortex-M4 to run bare-metal applications, together with a wide range of peripherals.

Following the release of this new platform, Bootlin ported its Embedded Linux and Yocto training courses to be available on STM32MP1, and also published a long series of tutorials showing how to use Buildroot to build an embedded Linux system on STM32MP1: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6 and part 7.

We are happy to announce that we have partnered with ST to develop an improved support of Buildroot on STM32MP1, which is materialized by a Buildroot BR2_EXTERNAL available on Github at https://github.com/bootlin/buildroot-external-st. In Buildroot, a BR2_EXTERNAL is an extension of the core Buildroot, with additional configurations and/or packages.

This BR2_EXTERNAL tree is an extension of Buildroot 2021.02, which provides four example Buildroot configuration to easily get started on STM32MP1 platforms:

  • st_stm32mp157a_dk1, building a basic Linux system for the STM32MP1 Discovery Kit 1 platform, with a minimal Linux root filesystem
  • st_stm32mp157c_dk2, building a basic Linux system for the STM32MP1 Discovery Kit 2 platform, with a minimal Linux root filesystem
  • st_stm32mp157a_dk1_demo, building a much more featureful Linux system for the STM32MP1 Discovery Kit 1 platform, with Linux root filesystem that allows to run Qt5 applications with OpenGL acceleration on the HDMI output, that supports audio, demonstrates the usage of the Cortex-M4, uses OP-TEE, and more.
  • st_stm32mp157c_dk2_demo, building a much more featureful Linux system for the STM32MP1 Discovery Kit 2 platform, with Linux root filesystem that allows to run Qt5 applications with OpenGL acceleration on both the integrated DSI display and HDMI output, that supports audio, WiFi and Bluetooth, demonstrates the usage of the Cortex-M4, uses OP-TEE, and more.

This BR2_EXTERNAL is designed to work with Buildroot 2021.02, with only a small set of modifications, which since then have been integrated in upstream Buildroot, ensuring that STM32MP1 users can directly use upstream Buildroot for their projects.

There is extensive documentation on how to use this BR2_EXTERNAL tree as well as how to test the various features of the STM32MP1 platform: using STM32CubeProgrammer, using Device Tree generated from STM32 CubeMX, using the Cortex-M4, testing display support, using Qt5, using WiFi, using Bluetooth, using audio and using OP-TEE. We have also documented the internals of the BR2_EXTERNAL components.

This Buildroot support is using the latest software components from the recently released 3.1 BSP from ST (see release notes), so it is based on Linux 5.10, U-Boot 2020.10, TF-A 2.4 and OP-TEE 3.12. We will keep this BR2_EXTERNAL updated with newer releases of the ST BSP.

If you face any issue while using this Buildroot support for STM32MP1, you can use the issue tracker of the Github project, or use the ST community forums. Bootlin can also provide commercial support on Linux on STM32MP1 platforms, as well as training courses.

Device Tree 101 webinar slides and videos

As we announced back in January, we have offered in partnership with ST on February 9 a free webinar titled Device Tree 101, which gives a detailed introduction to the Device Tree, an important mechanism used in the embedded Linux ecosystem to describe hardware platforms. We were happy to see the interest around this topic and webinar.

Bootlin has always shared freely and openly all its technical contents, including our training materials, and this webinar is no exception. We are therefore sharing the slides and video recording of both sessions of this webinar:

Thanks to everyone who participated and thanks to ST for the support in organizing this event! Do not hesitate to share and/or like our video, and to suggest us other topics that would be useful to cover in future webinars!

Building a Linux system for the STM32MP1: remote firmware updates

After another long break, here is our new article in the series of blog posts about building a Linux system for the STM32MP1 platform. After showing how to build a minimal Linux system for the STM32MP157 platform, how to connect and use an I2C based pressure/temperature/humidity sensor and how to integrate Qt5 in our system, how to set up a development environment to write our own Qt5 application, how to develop a Qt5 application, and how to setup factory flashing, we are now going to discuss the topic of in-field firmware update.

List of articles in this series:

  1. Building a Linux system for the STM32MP1: basic system
  2. Building a Linux system for the STM32MP1: connecting an I2C sensor
  3. Building a Linux system for the STM32MP1: enabling Qt5 for graphical applications
  4. Building a Linux system for the STM32MP1: setting up a Qt5 application development environment
  5. Building a Linux system for the STM32MP1: developing a Qt5 graphical application
  6. Building a Linux system for the STM32MP1: implementing factory flashing
  7. Building a Linux system for the STM32MP1: remote firmware updates

Why remote firmware updates?

The days and age when it was possible to build and flash an embedded system firmware, ship the device and forget it, are long behind us. Systems have gotten more complicated, and we therefore have to fix bugs and security issues after the device has been shipped, and we often want to deploy new features in the field into existing devices. For all those reasons, the ability to remotely update the firmware of embedded devices is now a must-have.

Open-source firmware update tools

There are different possibilities to update your system:

  • If you’re using a binary distribution, use the package manager of this distribution to update individual components
  • Do complete system image updates, at the block-level, replacing the entire system image with an updated one. Three main open-source solutions are available: swupdate, Mender.io and RAUC.
  • Do file-based updates, with solutions such as OSTree.

In this blog post, we are going to show how to set up the swupdate solution.

swupdate is a tool installed on the target that can receive an update image (.swu file), either from a local media or from a remote server, and use it to update various parts of the system. Typically, it will be used to update the Linux kernel and the root filesystem, but it can also be used to update additional partitions, FPGA bitstreams, etc.

swupdate implements two possible update strategies:

  • A dual copy strategy, where the storage has enough space to store two copies of the entire filesystem. This allows to run the system from copy A, update copy B, and reboot it into copy B. The next update will of course update copy A.
  • A single copy strategy, where the upgrade process consists in rebooting into a minimal system that runs entirely from RAM, and that will be responsible for updating the system on storage.

For this blog post, we will implement the dual copy strategy, but the single copy strategy is also supported for systems with tighter storage restrictions.

We are going to setup swupdate step by step: first by triggering updates locally, and then seeing how to trigger updates remotely.

Local usage of swupdate

Add USB storage support

As a first step, in order to transfer the update image to the target, we will use a USB stick. This requires having USB mass storage support in the Linux kernel. So let’s adjust our Linux kernel configuration by running make linux-menuconfig. Within the Linux kernel configuration:

  • Enable the CONFIG_SCSI option. This is a requirement for USB mass storage support
  • Enable the CONFIG_BLK_DEV_SD option, needed for SCSI disk support, which is another requirement for USB mass storage.
  • Enable the CONFIG_USB_STORAGE option.
  • The CONFIG_VFAT_FS option, to support the FAT filesystem, is already enabled.
  • Enable the CONFIG_NLS_CODEPAGE_437 and CONFIG_NLS_ISO8859_1 options, to have the necessary support to decode filenames in the FAT filesystem.

Then, run make linux-update-defconfig to preserve these kernel configurations changes in your kernel configuration file at board/stmicroelectronics/stm32mp157-dk/linux.config.

swupdate setup

In Target packages, System tools, enable swupdate. You can disable the install default website setting since we are not going to use the internal swupdate web server.

Take this opportunity to also enable the gptfdisk tool and its sgdisk sub-option in the Hardware handling submenu. We will need this tool later to update the partition table at the end of the update process.

Now that we have both both USB storage support and the swupdate package enabled, let’s build a new version of our system by running make. Flash the resulting image on your SD card, and boot your target. You should have swupdate available:

# swupdate -h
Swupdate v2018.11.0

Licensed under GPLv2. See source distribution for detailed copyright notices.

swupdate (compiled Mar  4 2020)
Usage swupdate [OPTION]
 -f, --file           : configuration file to use
 -p, --postupdate               : execute post-update command
 -e, --select , : Select software images set and source
                                  Ex.: stable,main
 -i, --image          : Software to be installed
 -l, --loglevel          : logging level
 -L, --syslog                   : enable syslog logger
 -n, --dry-run                  : run SWUpdate without installing the software
 -N, --no-downgrading  : not install a release older as 
 -o, --output      : saves the incoming stream
 -v, --verbose                  : be verbose, set maximum loglevel
     --version                  : print SWUpdate version and exit
 -c, --check                    : check image and exit, use with -i 
 -h, --help                     : print this help and exit
 -w, --webserver [OPTIONS]      : Parameters to be passed to webserver
	mongoose arguments:
	  -l, --listing                  : enable directory listing
	  -p, --port               : server port number  (default: 8080)
	  -r, --document-root      : path to document root directory (default: .)
	  -a, --api-version [1|2]        : set Web protocol API to v1 (legacy) or v2 (default v2)
	  --auth-domain                  : set authentication domain if any (default: none)
	  --global-auth-file             : set authentication file if any (default: none)

Take a USB stick with a FAT filesystem on it, which you can mount:

# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt

If that works, we’re now ready to move on to the next step of actually getting a firmware update image.

Generate the swupdate image

swupdate has its own update image format, and you need to generate an image that complies with this format so that swupdate can use it to upgrade your system. The format is simple: it’s a CPIO archive, which contains one file named sw-description describing the contents of the update image, and one or several additional files that are the images to update.

First, let’s create our sw-description file in board/stmicroelectronics/stm32mp157-dk/sw-description. The tags and properties available are described in the swupdate documentation.

software = {
	version = "0.1.0";
	rootfs = {
		rootfs-1: {
			images: (
			{
				filename = "rootfs.ext4.gz";
				compressed = true;
				device = "/dev/mmcblk0p4";
			});
		}
		rootfs-2: {
			images: (
			{
				filename = "rootfs.ext4.gz";
				compressed = true;
				device = "/dev/mmcblk0p5";
			});
		}
	}
}

This describes a single software component rootfs, which is available as two software collections, to implement the dual copy mechanism. The root filesystem will have one copy in /dev/mmcblk0p4 and another copy in /dev/mmcblk0p5. They will be updated from a compressed image called rootfs.ext4.gz.

Once this sw-description file is written, we can write a small script that generates the swupdate image. We’ll put this script in board/stmicroelectronics/stm32mp157-dk/gen-swupdate-image.sh:

#!/bin/sh

BOARD_DIR=$(dirname $0)

cp ${BOARD_DIR}/sw-description ${BINARIES_DIR}

IMG_FILES="sw-description rootfs.ext4.gz"

pushd ${BINARIES_DIR}
for f in ${IMG_FILES} ; do
	echo ${f}
done | cpio -ovL -H crc > buildroot.swu
popd

It simply copies the sw-description file to BINARIES_DIR (which is output/images), and then creates a buildroot.swu CPIO archive that contains the sw-description and rootfs.ext4.gz files.

Of course, make sure this script has executable permissions.

Then, we need to slightly adjust our Buildroot configuration, so run make menuconfig, and:

  • In System configuration, in the option Custom scripts to run after creating filesystem images, add board/stmicroelectronics/stm32mp157-dk/gen-swupdate-image.sh after the existing value support/scripts/genimage.sh. This will make sure our new script generating the swupdate image is executed as a post-image script, at the end of the build.
  • In Filesystem images, enable the gzip compression method for the ext2/3/4 root filesystem, so that a rootfs.ext4.gz image is generated.

With that in place, we are now able to generate our firmware image, by simply running make in Buildroot. At the end of the build, the output/images/ folder should contain the sw-description and rootfs.ext4.gz files. You can look at the contents of buildroot.swu:

$ cat output/images/buildroot.swu | cpio -it
sw-description
rootfs.ext4.gz
58225 blocks

Partioning scheme and booting logic

We now need to adjust the partitioning scheme of our SD card so that it has two partitions for the root filesystem, one for each copy. This partitioning scheme is defined in board/stmicroelectronics/stm32mp157-dk/genimage.cfg, which we change to:

image sdcard.img {
        hdimage {
                gpt = "true"
        }

        partition fsbl1 {
                image = "tf-a-stm32mp157c-dk2.stm32"
        }

        partition fsbl2 {
                image = "tf-a-stm32mp157c-dk2.stm32"
        }

        partition ssbl {
                image = "u-boot.stm32"
        }

        partition rootfs1 {
                image = "rootfs.ext4"
                partition-type = 0x83
                bootable = "yes"
                size = 256M
        }

        partition rootfs2 {
                partition-type = 0x83
                size = 256M
        }
}

As explained in the first blog post of this series, the /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf file is read by the bootloader to know how to boot the system. Among other things, this file defines the Linux kernel command line, which contains root=/dev/mmcblk0p4 to tell the kernel where the root filesystem is. But with our dual copy upgrade scheme, the root filesystem will sometimes be on /dev/mmcblk0p4, sometimes on /dev/mmcblk0p5. To achieve that without constantly updating the extlinux.conf file, we will use /dev/mmcblk0p${devplist} instead. devplist is a U-Boot variable that indicates from which partition the extlinux.conf file was read, which turns out to be the partition of our root filesystem. So, your board/stmicroelectronics/stm32mp157-dk/overlay/boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf file should look like this:

label stm32mp15-buildroot
  kernel /boot/zImage
  devicetree /boot/stm32mp157c-dk2.dtb
  append root=/dev/mmcblk0p${devplist} rootwait console=ttySTM0,115200 vt.global_cursor_default=0

For the dual copy strategy to work, we need to tell the bootloader to boot either from the root filesystem in the rootfs1 partition or the rootfs2 partition. This will be done using the bootable flag of each GPT partition, and this is what this script does: it toggles the bootable flag of 4th and 5th partition of the SD card. This way, the partition with the bootable flag will lose it, and the other partition will gain it. Thanks to this, at the next reboot, U-Boot will consider the system located in the other SD card partition. This work will be done by a /etc/swupdate/postupdate.sh script, that you will store in board/stmicroelectronics/stm32mp157-dk/overlay/etc/swupdate/postupdate.sh, which contains:

#!/bin/sh
sgdisk -A 4:toggle:2 -A 5:toggle:2 /dev/mmcblk0
reboot

Make sure this script is executable.

With all these changes in place, let’s restart the Buildroot build by running make. The sdcard.img should contain the new partioning scheme:

$ sgdisk -p output/images/sdcard.img
[...]
Number  Start (sector)    End (sector)  Size       Code  Name
   1              34             497   232.0 KiB   8300  fsbl1
   2             498             961   232.0 KiB   8300  fsbl2
   3             962            2423   731.0 KiB   8300  ssbl
   4            2424          526711   256.0 MiB   8300  rootfs1
   5          526712         1050999   256.0 MiB   8300  rootfs2

Reflash your SD card with the new sdcard.img, and boot this new system. Transfer the buildroot.swu update image to your USB stick.

Testing the firmware update locally

After booting the system, mount the USB stick, which contains the buildroot.swu file:

# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/
# ls /mnt/
buildroot.swu

Let’s trigger the system upgrade with swupdate:

# swupdate -i /mnt/buildroot.swu -e rootfs,rootfs-2 -p /etc/swupdate/postupdate.sh

Swupdate v2018.11.0

Licensed under GPLv2. See source distribution for detailed copyright notices.

Registered handlers:
	dummy
	raw
	rawfile
software set: rootfs mode: rootfs-2
Software updated successfully
Please reboot the device to start the new software
[INFO ] : SWUPDATE successful ! 
Warning: The kernel is still using the old partition table.
The new table will be used at the next reboot or after you
run partprobe(8) or kpartx(8)
The operation has completed successfully.
# Stopping qt-sensor-demo: OK
Stopping dropbear sshd: OK
Stopping network: OK
Saving random seed... done.
Stopping klogd: OK
Stopping syslogd: OK
umount: devtmpfs busy - remounted read-only
[  761.949576] EXT4-fs (mmcblk0p4): re-mounted. Opts: (null)
The system is going down NOW!
Sent SIGTERM to all processes
Sent SIGKILL to all processes
Requesting system reboot
[  763.965243] reboot: ResNOTICE:  CPU: STM32MP157CAC Rev.B
NOTICE:  Model: STMicroelectronics STM32MP157C-DK2 Discovery Board

The -i option indicates the firmware update file, while the -e option indicates which software component should be updated. Here we update the rootfs in its slot 2, rootfs-2, which is in /dev/mmcblk0p5. The -p option tells to run our post-update script when the update is successful. In the above log, we see that the system is being rebooted right after the update.

At the next boot, you should see:

U-Boot 2018.11-stm32mp-r2.1 (Mar 04 2020 - 15:28:34 +0100)
[...]
mmc0 is current device
Scanning mmc 0:5...
Found /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf
[...]
append: root=/dev/mmcblk0p5 rootwait console=ttySTM0,115200 vt.global_cursor_default=0

during the U-Boot part. So we see it is loading extlinux.conf from the MMC partition 5, and has properly set root=/dev/mmcblk0p5. So the kernel and Device Tree will be loaded from MMC partition 5, and this partition will also be used by Linux as the root filesystem.

With all this logic, we could now potentially have some script that gets triggered when a USB stick is inserted, mount it, check if an update image is available on the USB stick, and if so, launch swupdate and reboot. This would be perfectly fine for local updates, for example with an operator in charge of doing the update of the device.

However, we can do better, and support over-the-air updates, a topic that we will discuss in the next section.

Over-the-air updates

To support over-the-air updates with swupdate, we will have to:

  1. Install on a server a Web interface that allows the swupdate program to retrieve firmware update files, and the user to trigger the updates.
  2. Run swupdate in daemon mode on the target.

Set up the web server: hawkBit

swupdate is capable of interfacing with a management interface provided by the Eclipse hawkBit project. Using this web interface, one can manage its fleet of embedded devices, and rollout updates to these devices remotely.

hawkBit has plenty of capabilities, and we are here going to set it up in a very minimal way, with no authentication and a very simple configuration.

As suggested in the project getting started page, we’ll use a pre-existing Docker container image to run hawkBit:

sudo docker run -p 8080:8080 hawkbit/hawkbit-update-server:latest \
     --hawkbit.dmf.rabbitmq.enabled=false \
     --hawkbit.server.ddi.security.authentication.anonymous.enabled=true

After a short while, it should show:

2020-03-06 09:15:46.492  ... Started ServerConnector@3728a578{HTTP/1.1,[http/1.1]}{0.0.0.0:8080}
2020-03-06 09:15:46.507  ... Jetty started on port(s) 8080 (http/1.1) with context path '/'
2020-03-06 09:15:46.514  ... Started Start in 21.312 seconds (JVM running for 22.108)

From this point, you can connect with your web browser to http://localhost:8080 to access the hawkBit interface. Login with the admin login and admin password.

hawkBit login

Once in the main hawkBit interface, go to the System Config tab, and enable the option Allow targets to download artifacts without security credentials. Of course, for a real deployment, you will want to set up proper credentials and authentification.

hawkBit System Config

In the Distribution tab, create a new Distribution by clicking on the plus sign in the Distributions panel:

hawkBit New Distribution

Then in the same tab, but in the Software Modules panel, create a new software module:

hawkBit New Software Module

Once done, assign the newly added software module to the Buildroot distribution by dragging-drop it into the Buildroot distribution. Things should then look like this:

hawkBit Distribution

Things are now pretty much ready on the hawkBit side now. Let’s move on with the embedded device side.

Configure swupdate

We need to adjust the configuration of swupdate to enable its Suricatta functionality which is what allows to connect to an hawkBit server.

In Buildroot’s menuconfig, enable the libcurl (BR2_PACKAGE_LIBCURL) and json-c (BR2_PACKAGE_JSON_C) packages, both of which are needed for swupdate’s Suricatta. While at it, since we will adjust the swupdate configuration and we’ll want to preserve our custom configuration, change the BR2_PACKAGE_SWUPDATE_CONFIG option to point to board/stmicroelectronics/stm32mp157-dk/swupdate.config.

Then, run:

$ make swupdate-menuconfig

to enter the swupdate configuration interface. Enable the Suricatta option, and inside this menu, in the Server submenu, verify that the Server Type is hawkBit support. You can now exit the swupdate menuconfig.

Save our custom swupdate configuration permanently:

$ make swupdate-update-defconfig

With this proper swupdate configuration in place, we now need to create a runtime configuration file for swupdate, and an init script to start swupdate at boot time. Let’s start with the runtime configuration file, which we’ll store in board/stmicroelectronics/stm32mp157-dk/overlay/etc/swupdate/swupdate.cfg, containing:

globals :
{
	postupdatecmd = "/etc/swupdate/postupdate.sh";
};

suricatta :
{
	tenant = "default";
	id = "DEV001";
	url = "http://192.168.42.1:8080";
};

We specify the path to our post-update script so that it doesn’t have to be specified on the command line, and then we specify the Suricatta configuration details: id is the unique identifier of our board, the URL is the URL to connect to the hawkBit instance (make sure to replace that with the IP address of where you’re running hawkBit). tenant should be default, unless you’re using your hawkBit instance in complex setups to for example serve multiple customers.

Our post-update script also needs to be slightly adjusted. Indeed, we will need a marker that tells us upon reboot that an update has been done, in order to confirm to the server that the update has been successfully applied. So we change board/stmicroelectronics/stm32mp157-dk/overlay/etc/swupdate/postupdate.sh to:

#!/bin/sh

PART_STATUS=$(sgdisk -A 4:get:2 /dev/mmcblk0)
if test "${PART_STATUS}" = "4:2:1" ; then
        NEXT_ROOTFS=/dev/mmcblk0p5
else
        NEXT_ROOTFS=/dev/mmcblk0p4
fi

# Add update marker
mount ${NEXT_ROOTFS} /mnt
touch /mnt/update-ok
umount /mnt

sgdisk -A 4:toggle:2 -A 5:toggle:2 /dev/mmcblk0
reboot

What we do is that we simply mount the next root filesystem, and create a file /update-ok. This file will be checked by our swupdate init script, see below.

Then, our init script will be in board/stmicroelectronics/stm32mp157-dk/overlay/etc/init.d/S98swupdate, with executable permissions, and contain:

#!/bin/sh

DAEMON="swupdate"
PIDFILE="/var/run/$DAEMON.pid"

PART_STATUS=$(sgdisk -A 4:get:2 /dev/mmcblk0)
if test "${PART_STATUS}" = "4:2:1" ; then
	ROOTFS=rootfs-2
else
	ROOTFS=rootfs-1
fi

if test -f /update-ok ; then
	SURICATTA_ARGS="-c 2"
	rm -f /update-ok
fi

start() {
	printf 'Starting %s: ' "$DAEMON"
	# shellcheck disable=SC2086 # we need the word splitting
	start-stop-daemon -b -q -m -S -p "$PIDFILE" -x "/usr/bin/$DAEMON" \
		-- -f /etc/swupdate/swupdate.cfg -L -e rootfs,${ROOTFS} -u "${SURICATTA_ARGS}"
	status=$?
	if [ "$status" -eq 0 ]; then
		echo "OK"
	else
		echo "FAIL"
	fi
	return "$status"
}

stop() {
	printf 'Stopping %s: ' "$DAEMON"
	start-stop-daemon -K -q -p "$PIDFILE"
	status=$?
	if [ "$status" -eq 0 ]; then
		rm -f "$PIDFILE"
		echo "OK"
	else
		echo "FAIL"
	fi
	return "$status"
}

restart() {
	stop
	sleep 1
	start
}

case "$1" in
        start|stop|restart)
		"$1";;
	reload)
		# Restart, since there is no true "reload" feature.
		restart;;
        *)
                echo "Usage: $0 {start|stop|restart|reload}"
                exit 1
esac

This is modeled after typical Buildroot init scripts. A few points worth mentioning:

  • At the beginning of the script, we determine which copy of the root filesystem needs to be updated by looking at which partition currently is marked “bootable”. This is used to fill in the ROOTFS variable.
  • We also determine if we are just finishing an update, by looking at the presence of a /update-ok file.
  • When starting swupdate, we pass a few options: -f with the path to the swupdate configuration file, -L to enable syslog logging, -e to indicate which copy of the root filesystem should be updated, and -u '${SURICATTA_ARGS}' to run in Suricatta mode, with SURICATTA_ARGS containing -c 2 to confirm the completion of an update.

Generate a new image with the updated swupdate, its configuration file and init script, and reboot your system.

Deploying an update

When booting, your system starts swupdate automatically:

Starting swupdate: OK
[...]
# ps aux | grep swupdate
  125 root     /usr/bin/swupdate -f /etc/swupdate/swupdate.cfg -L -e rootfs,rootfs-1 -u
  132 root     /usr/bin/swupdate -f /etc/swupdate/swupdate.cfg -L -e rootfs,rootfs-1 -u

Back to the hawkBit administration interface, the Deployment tab should show one notification:

hawkBit new device notification

and when clicking on it, you should see our DEV001 device:

hawkBit new device

Now, go to the Upload tab, select the Buildroot software module, and click on Upload File. Upload the buildroot.swu file here:

hawkBit Upload

Back into the Deployment tab, drag and drop the Buildroot distribution into the DEV001 device. A pending update should appear in the Action history for DEV001:

hawkBit upgrade pending

The swupdate on your target will poll regularly the server (by default every 300 seconds, can be customized in the System config tab of the hawkBit interface) to know if an update is available. When that happens, the update will be downloaded and applied, the system will reboot, and at the next boot the update will be confirmed as successful, showing this status in the hawkBit interface:

hawkBit upgrade confirmed

If you’ve reached this step, your system has been successfully updated, congratulations! Of course, there are many more things to do to get a proper swupdate/hawkBit deployment: assign unique device IDs (for example based on MAC addresses or SoC serial number), implement proper authentication between the swupdate client and the server, implement image encryption if necessary, improve the upgrade validation mechanism to make sure it detects if the new image doesn’t boot properly, etc.

Conclusion

In this blog post, we have learned about firmware upgrade solutions, and specifically about swupdate. We’ve seen how to set up swupdate in the context of Buildroot, first for local updates, and then for remote updates using the hawkBit management interface. Hopefully this will be useful for your future embedded projects!

As usual, the complete Buildroot code to reproduce the same setup is available in our branch 2019.02/stm32mp157-dk-blog-7, in two commits: one for the first step implementing support just for local updates, and another one for remote update support.

Building a Linux system for the STM32MP1: connecting an I2C sensor

After showing how to build and run a minimal Linux system for the STM32MP157 Discovery board in a previous blog post, we are now going to see how to connect an I2C sensor, adjust the Device Tree to enable the I2C bus and I2C device, and how to adjust the kernel configuration to enable the appropriate kernel driver.

List of articles in this series:

  1. Building a Linux system for the STM32MP1: basic system
  2. Building a Linux system for the STM32MP1: connecting an I2C sensor
  3. Building a Linux system for the STM32MP1: enabling Qt5 for graphical applications
  4. Building a Linux system for the STM32MP1: setting up a Qt5 application development environment
  5. Building a Linux system for the STM32MP1: developing a Qt5 graphical application
  6. Building a Linux system for the STM32MP1: implementing factory flashing
  7. Building a Linux system for the STM32MP1: remote firmware updates

Choosing an I2C sensor

BME280 breakout boardFor this project, we wanted an I2C sensor that was at least capable of measuring the temperature, so we simply started by searching i2c temperature sensor on Amazon. After a bit of research, we found that the BME280 sensor from Bosch was available on several inexpensive break-out boards, and it already had a device driver in the upstream Linux kernel. When choosing hardware, it is always important to check whether it is already supported or not in the upstream Linux kernel. Having a driver already integrated in the upstream Linux kernel has a number of advantages:

  • The driver is readily available, you don’t have to integrate a vendor-provided driver, with all the possible integration issues
  • The driver has been reviewed by the Linux kernel maintainers, so you can be pretty confident of the code quality
  • The driver is using standard Linux interfaces, and not some vendor-specific one
  • The driver will be maintained in the long run by the kernel community, so you can continue to update your Linux kernel to benefit from security updates, bug fixes and new features

In addition, it also turns out that the BME280 sensor not only provides temperature sensing, but also pressure and humidity, which makes it even more interesting.

Among the numerous inexpensive BME280 break-out boards, we have chosen specifically this one, but plenty of others are available. The following details will work with any other BME280-based break-out board.

Connecting the I2C sensor

From a connectivity point of view, our I2C sensor is pretty simple: a VIN signal for power, a GND signal for ground, a SCL for the I2C clock and a SDA for the I2C data.

To understand how to connect this sensor to the Discovery board, we need to start with the board user manual.

The Discovery board has two main expansion connectors: CN2 and the Arduino connectors.

Connector CN2

Connector CN2 is a 40-pin male header on the front side of the board:

CN2 connector

Section 7.17 of the board user manual documents the pin-out of this connector. There is one I2C bus available, through the I2C1_SDA (pin 27) and I2C1_SCL (pin 28) signals.

CN2 I2C1

Arduino connectors

Connectors CN13, CN14, CN16, CN17 are female connectors on the back side of the board. They are compatible in pin-out and form-factor with the Arduino connector:

Arduino connectors

Section 7.16 of the board user manual documents the pin-out for these connectors. There is one I2C bus available as well in CN13, through the I2C5_SDA (pin 9) and I2C5_SCL (pin 10) signals.

CN13

Choosing the connector

According to the block diagram in Figure 3 of the board user manual, the I2C1 bus is already used to connect the touchscreen, the USB hub, the audio codec and the HDMI transceiver. However, I2C5 doesn’t seem to be used at all. In addition, with the screen mounted on the Discovery board, the CN2 connector is beneath the screen, which makes it a bit more difficult to use than the Arduino connectors on the back side.

We will therefore use the I2C5 bus, through the Arduino connector CN13. Pin 9 will be used to connect the data signal of our sensor, and pin 10 will be used to connect the clock signal of our sensor.

Finalizing the connectivity

We still have to find out how to connect the VIN and GND pins. According to the BME280 datasheet, VDDmain supply voltage range: 1.71V to 3.6V. The Arduino connector CN16 provides either 3.3V or 5V, so we’ll chose 3.3V (pin 4). And this connector also has multiple ground pins, among which we will chose pin 6.

Overall, this gives us the following connections:

Sensor signal Arduino connector Pin
VIN CN16 pin 4
GND CN16 pin 6
SDA CN13 pin 9
SCL CN13 pin 10

Here are a few pictures of the setup. First, on the sensor side, we have a purple wire for VIN, a grey wire for GND, a white wire for SCL and a black wire for SDA:

I2C sensor connection

On the board side, we can see the purple wire (VIN) going to pin 4 of CN16, the grey wire (GND) going to pin 6 of CN16, the white wire (SCL) going to pin 10 of CN13 and the black wire (SDA) going to pin 9 of CN13.

I2C sensor connected to the board

With this we’re now all set in terms of hardware setup, let’s move on to enabling the I2C bus in Linux!

Enabling the I2C bus

An introduction to the Device Tree

In order to enable the I2C bus, we’ll need to modify the Device Tree, so we’ll first need to give a few details about what Device Tree is. If you read again our previous blog post in this series, we already mentioned the Device Tree. As part of the Buildroot build process, a file called stm32mp157c-dk2.dtb is produced, and this file is used at boot time by the Linux kernel: it is the Device Tree.

On most embedded architectures, devices are connected using buses that do not provide any dynamic enumeration capabilities. While buses like USB or PCI provide such capabilities, popular buses used on embedded architectures like memory-mapped buses, I2C, SPI and several others do not allow the operating system to ask the hardware: what peripherals are connected ? what are their characteristics ?. The operating system needs to know which devices are available and what their characteristics are. This is where the Device Tree comes into play: it is a data structure that describes in the form of a tree all the devices that we have in our hardware platform, so that the Linux kernel knows the topology of the hardware.

On ARM platforms, each particular board is described by its own Device Tree file. In our case, the STM32MP157 Discovery Kit 2 is described by the Device Tree file arch/arm/boot/dts/stm32mp157c-dk2.dts in the Linux kernel source code. This human-readable source file, with a .dts extension, is compiled during the Linux kernel build process into a machine-readable binary file, with a .dtb extension.

This stm32mp157c-dk2.dts describes the hardware of our Discovery Kit 2 platform. In fact, it only describes what is specific to the Discovery Kit 2: the display panel, the touchscreen, the WiFi and Bluetooth chip. Everything else is common with the Discovery Kit 1 platform, which is why the stm32mp157c-dk2.dts file includes the arm/boot/dts/stm32mp157a-dk1.dts file. Indeed, stm32mp157a-dk1.dts describes the hardware on the Discovery Kit 1, which is the same as the Discovery Kit 2, without the display, touchscreen and WiFi/Bluetooth chip.

In turn, the stm32mp157a-dk1.dts includes three other Device Tree files:

At this point, we won’t give much more generic details about the Device Tree, as it’s an entire topic on its own. For additional details, you could check the Device Tree for Dummies presentation from your author (slides, video) or the devicetree.org web site.

I2C controllers in the Device Tree

Zooming in to the topic of I2C, we can see that arm/boot/dts/stm32mp157c.dtsi describes 6 I2C controllers through six different nodes in the Device Tree:

  • i2c1: i2c@40012000
  • i2c2: i2c@40013000
  • i2c3: i2c@40014000
  • i2c4: i2c@5c002000
  • i2c5: i2c@40015000
  • i2c6: i2c@5c009000

This list of six I2C controllers nice matches the list of I2C controllers in the STM32MP157 datasheet, and their base address in the memory map, section 2.5.2:

I2C1I2C2I2C3I2C4I2C5I2C6

In the file arm/boot/dts/stm32mp157a-dk1.dts, we can see that the I2C1 bus is enabled, and that a cs42l51 audio codec (I2C address 0x4a) and a sii9022 HDMI transceiver (I2C address 0x39) are connected to it:

&i2c1 {
	status = "okay";

	cs42l51: cs42l51@4a {
		compatible = "cirrus,cs42l51";
		reg = <0x4a>;
	};

	hdmi-transmitter@39 {
		compatible = "sil,sii9022";
		reg = <0x39>;
	};
};

Also, on the I2C4 bus, we can see the USB-C controller (I2C address 0x28) and the PMIC (I2C address 0x33):

&i2c4 {
	status = "okay";

	typec: stusb1600@28 {
		compatible = "st,stusb1600";
		reg = <0x28>;
	};

	pmic: stpmic@33 {
		compatible = "st,stpmic1";
		reg = <0x33>;
	};
};

So, to enable our I2C5 bus, we will simply need to add:

&i2c5 {
	status = "okay";
	clock-frequency = <100000>;
	pinctrl-names = "default", "sleep";
	pinctrl-0 = <&i2c5_pins_a>;
	pinctrl-1 = <&i2c5_pins_sleep_a>;
};

to enable the bus. This piece of code adds the following Device Tree properties to the I2C5 Device Tree node:

  • status = "okay" which simply tells the Linux kernel: I really intend to use this device, so please enable whatever driver is needed to use this device
  • clock-frequency = <100000> tells Linux at which frequency we want to operate the I2C bus: in this case, 100 kHz
  • The pinctrl properties configure the pin muxing, so that the pins are configured in the I2C function when the system is running (the default state) and into a different state to preserve power when the system is in suspend to RAM (sleep state). Both i2c5_pins_a and i2c5_pins_sleep_a are already defined in arch/arm/boot/dts/stm32mp157-pinctrl.dtsi.

For now, this doesn’t describe any device on the bus, but should be sufficient to have the bus enabled in Linux. The question now is how to make this modification in our Device Tree in the proper way ?

Changing the Linux kernel source code

When Buildroot builds each package, it extracts its source code in output/build/<package>-<version>, so the source code of our Linux kernel has been extracted in output/build/linux-custom/. One could therefore be tempted to make his code changes directory in output/build/linux-custom/, but this has a number of major drawbacks:

  1. output/build/linux-custom/ is not under version control: it is not part of a Linux kernel Git repository, so you can’t version control your changes, which is really not great
  2. output/build/linux-custom/ is a temporary folder: if you do a make clean in Buildroot, this folder will be entirely removed, and re-created during the next Buildroot build

So, while doing a change directly in output/build/linux-custom/ is perfectly fine for quick/temporary changes, it’s not a good option to make changes that will be permanent.

To do this in a proper way, we will use a feature of Buildroot called pkg_OVERRIDE_SRCDIR, which is documented in section 8.12.6 Using Buildroot during development of the Buildroot manual. This feature allows to tell Buildroot: for a given package, please don’t download it from the usual location, but instead take the source code from a specific location on my system. This specific location will of course be under version control, and located outside of Buildroot, which allows to solve the two issues mentioned above.

So, let’s get set this up for the Linux kernel source code:

  1. Start in the parent folder of Buildroot, so that the Linux kernel source code ends up being side-by-side with Buildroot
  2. Clone the official upstream Linux kernel repository. Even though we could directly clone the STMicro Linux kernel repository, your author always finds it nicer to have the origin Git remote set up to the official upstream Git repository.
    git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git
    
  3. Move inside this Git repository
    cd linux/
    
  4. Add the STMicro Linux kernel repository as a remote:
    git remote add stmicro https://github.com/STMicroelectronics/linux.git
    
  5. Fetch all the changes from the STMicro Linux kernel repository:
    git fetch stmicro
    
  6. Create a new branch, called bme280, based on the tag v4.19-stm32mp-r1.2. This tag is the one used by our Buildroot configuration as the version of the Linux kernel. The following command also moves to this new branch as the same time:
    git checkout -b bme280 v4.19-stm32mp-r1.2
    
  7. At this point, our linux/ folder contains the exact same source code as what Buildroot has retrieved. It is time to make our Device Tree change by editing arch/arm/boot/dts/stm32mp157c-dk2.dts and at the end of it, add:

    &i2c5 {
    	status = "okay";
    	clock-frequency = <100000>;
    	pinctrl-names = "default", "sleep";
    	pinctrl-0 = <&i2c5_pins_a>;
    	pinctrl-1 = <&i2c5_pins_sleep_a>;
    };
    

    Once done, we need to tell Buildroot to use our kernel source code, using the pkg_OVERRIDE_SRCDIR mechanism. To this, create a file called local.mk, in the top-level Buildroot source directory, which contains:

    LINUX_OVERRIDE_SRCDIR = $(TOPDIR)/../linux
    

    This tells Buildroot to pick the Linux kernel source from $(TOPDIR)/../linux. We’ll now ask Buildroot to wipe out its Linux kernel build, and do a build again:

    $ make linux-dirclean
    $ make
    

    If you look closely at what Buildroot will do, it will do a rsync of the Linux kernel source code from your linux/ Git repository to output/build/linux-custom in Buildroot, and then do the build. You can check output/build/linux-custom/arch/arm/boot/dts/stm32mp157c-dk2.dts to make sure that your I2C5 change is there!

    If that is the case, then reflash output/images/sdcard.img on your SD card, and run the new system on the board. It’s now time to test the I2C bus!

    Testing the I2C bus

    After booting the new system on your Discovery board and logging in as root, let’s have a look at all I2C related devices:

    # ls -l /sys/bus/i2c/devices/
    total 0
    lrwxrwxrwx    0-002a -> ../../../devices/platform/soc/40012000.i2c/i2c-0/0-002a
    lrwxrwxrwx    0-0038 -> ../../../devices/platform/soc/40012000.i2c/i2c-0/0-0038
    lrwxrwxrwx    0-0039 -> ../../../devices/platform/soc/40012000.i2c/i2c-0/0-0039
    lrwxrwxrwx    0-004a -> ../../../devices/platform/soc/40012000.i2c/i2c-0/0-004a
    lrwxrwxrwx    2-0028 -> ../../../devices/platform/soc/5c002000.i2c/i2c-2/2-0028
    lrwxrwxrwx    2-0033 -> ../../../devices/platform/soc/5c002000.i2c/i2c-2/2-0033
    lrwxrwxrwx    i2c-0 -> ../../../devices/platform/soc/40012000.i2c/i2c-0
    lrwxrwxrwx    i2c-1 -> ../../../devices/platform/soc/40015000.i2c/i2c-1
    lrwxrwxrwx    i2c-2 -> ../../../devices/platform/soc/5c002000.i2c/i2c-2
    lrwxrwxrwx    i2c-3 -> ../../../devices/platform/soc/40012000.i2c/i2c-0/i2c-3
    

    This folder is part of the sysfs filesystem, which is used by the Linux kernel to expose to user-space applications all sort of details about the hardware devices connected to the system. More specifically, in this folder, we have symbolic links for two types of devices:

    • The I2C busses: i2c-0, i2c-1, i2c-2 and i2c-3. It is worth mentioning that the bus numbers do not match the datasheet: they are simply numbered from 0 to N. However, the i2c-0 symbolic link shows it’s the I2C controller at base address 0x40012000, so it’s I2C1 in the datasheet, i2c-1 is at base address 0x40015000 so it’s I2C5 in the datasheet, and i2c-2 at base address 0x5c002000 is I2C4 in the datasheet. i2c-3 is special as it’s not an I2C bus provided by the SoC itself, but the I2C bus provided by the HDMI transmitter to talk with the remote HDMI device (since this is unrelated to our discussion, we won’t go into more details on this).
    • The I2C devices: 0-002a, 0-0038, 0-0039, 0-004a, 2-0028, 2-033. These entries have the form B-SSSS where B is the bus number and SSSS is the I2C address of the device. So you can see that for example 0-004a corresponds to the cs42l51 audio codec we mentioned earlier.

    In our case, we are interested by I2C5, which is known by Linux as i2c-1. We will use the i2cdetect utility, provided by Busybox, to probe the different devices on this bus:

    # i2cdetect -y 1
         0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  a  b  c  d  e  f
    00:          -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 
    10: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 
    20: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 
    30: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 
    40: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 
    50: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 
    60: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 
    70: -- -- -- -- -- -- 76 --                         
    

    Interesting, we have a device at address 0x76! Try to disconnect VIN of your I2C sensor, and repeat the command:

    # i2cdetect -y 1
         0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  a  b  c  d  e  f
    00:          -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 
    10: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 
    20: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 
    30: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 
    40: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 
    50: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 
    60: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 
    70: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --                         
    

    The device at 0x76 has disappeared, so it looks like our sensor is at I2C address 0x76. To confirm this, let’s have a look at what the BME280 datasheet says about the I2C address of the device, in section 6.2 I2C Interface:

    BME280 I2C address

    So, the I2C address is indeed 0x76 when the SDO pin of the sensor is connected to GND, which is probably what our BME280 break-out board is doing. It matches the address we have detected with i2cdetect!

    Now, let’s talk to our device. According to section 5.4 Register description of the datasheet, there is a Chip ID register, at offset 0xD0 that is supposed to contain 0x60:

    BME280 Chip ID

    We can read this register using the i2cget command:

    # i2cget -y 1 0x76 0xd0
    0x60
    

    Good, this matches the expected value according to the BME280 datasheet, so it seems like communication with our I2C device is working, let’s move on to enabling the BME280 sensor driver.

    Enabling the sensor driver

    As discussed earlier, this BME280 sensor already has a driver in the upstream Linux kernel, in the IIO subsystem. IIO stands for Industrial Input/Output, and this subsystems contains a lot of drivers for various ADCs, sensors and other types of measurement/acquisition devices. In order to use this driver for our BME280 device, we will essentially have to do two things:

    1. Enable the driver in our Linux kernel configuration, so that the driver code gets built as part of our kernel image
    2. Describe the BME280 device in our Device Tree so that the Linux kernel knows we have one such device, and how it is connected to the system

    Adjusting the kernel configuration

    In the previous blog post, we explained that the Linux kernel configuration used to build the kernel for the STM32 Discovery board was located at board/stmicroelectronics/stm32mp157-dk/linux.config. Obviously, we are not going to edit this file manually: we need to run the standard Linux kernel configuration tools.

    It turns out that Buildroot has convenient shortcuts to manipulate the Linux kernel configuration. We can run the Linux kernel menuconfig configuration tool by running:

    $ make linux-menuconfig
    

    At this point, it is really important to not be confused by the fact that both Buildroot and the Linux kernel use the same configuration utility, but each have its own configuration. The Buildroot configuration describes your overall system (target architecture, which software components you want, which type of filesystem you want, etc.) while the Linux kernel configuration describes the kernel configuration itself (which drivers you want, which kernel features you need, etc.). So make sure to not confuse the menuconfig of Buildroot with the menuconfig of the Linux kernel!

    Once you have run make linux-menuconfig, the menuconfig of the Linux kernel will show up. You will then enable the following option:

    Device Drivers
    +- Industrial I/O support
       +- Pressure sensors
          +- Bosch Sensortec BMP180/BMP280 pressure sensor I2C driver
    

    Make sure to enable this option with a star <*> so that the driver is compiled inside the kernel image itself and not as a separate kernel module. You can then exit the menuconfig utility, and confirm that you want to save the configuration.

    At this point, the Linux kernel configuration file in output/build/linux-custom/.config has been changed. You can confirm it by running:

    $ grep CONFIG_BMP280 output/build/linux-custom/.config
    CONFIG_BMP280=y
    CONFIG_BMP280_I2C=y
    CONFIG_BMP280_SPI=y
    

    However, as we explained earlier, the output/build/linux-custom/ folder is temporary: it would be removed when doing a Buildroot make clean. We would like to permanently keep our Linux kernel configuration. Once again, Buildroot provides a nice shortcut to do this:

    $ make linux-update-defconfig
    

    After running this command, the kernel configuration file board/stmicroelectronics/stm32mp157-dk/linux.config has been updated, and this file is not temporary, and is under version control. If you run git diff, you can see the change on this file:

    $ git diff
    [...]
    index 878a0c39f1..12f3e22647 100644
    --- a/board/stmicroelectronics/stm32mp157-dk/linux.config
    +++ b/board/stmicroelectronics/stm32mp157-dk/linux.config
    @@ -169,6 +169,7 @@ CONFIG_STM32_LPTIMER_CNT=y
     CONFIG_STM32_DAC=y
     CONFIG_IIO_HRTIMER_TRIGGER=y
     CONFIG_IIO_STM32_LPTIMER_TRIGGER=y
    +CONFIG_BMP280=y
     CONFIG_PWM=y
     CONFIG_PWM_STM32=y
     CONFIG_PWM_STM32_LP=y
    

    We’re all set for the kernel configuration!

    Describing the BME280 in the Device Tree

    We now need to tell the Linux kernel that we have a BME280 sensor and how it is connected to the system, which is done by adding more details into our Device Tree. We have already enabled the I2C5 bus, and we now need to describe one device connected to it: this gets done by creating a child node of the I2C controller node.

    How do we know what to write in the Device Tree node describing the BME280 ? Using Device Tree bindings. Those bindings are specification documents that describe how a given device should be represented in the Device Tree: which properties are available, what are their possible values, etc. All Device Tree bindings supported by the Linux kernel are documented in Documentation/devicetree/bindings in the Linux kernel source code. For our BME280 device, the binding is at Documentation/devicetree/bindings/iio/pressure/bmp085.yaml.

    This document tells us that we have one required property, the compatible property, with the range of possible values. Since we have a BME280 sensor, we’ll use bosch,bme280. The other properties are optional, so we’ll ignore them for now. This binding also documents a reg property, which is used to provide to the Linux kernel the I2C address of the device.

    So, we’ll go back to our linux/ directory outside of Buildroot, where we cloned the Linux kernel repository, and we’ll adjust our Device Tree file arch/arm/boot/dts/stm32mp157c-dk2.dts so that it contains:

    &i2c5 {
    	status = "okay";
    	clock-frequency = <100000>;
    	pinctrl-names = "default", "sleep";
    	pinctrl-0 = <&i2c5_pins_a>;
    	pinctrl-1 = <&i2c5_pins_sleep_a>;
    
    	pressure@76 {
    		compatible = "bosch,bme280";
    		reg = <0x76>;
    	};
    };
    

    Re-building the kernel

    Let’s now ask Buildroot to rebuild the Linux kernel, with our Device Tree change and kernel configuration change. Instead of rebuilding from scratch, we’ll just ask Buildroot to restart the build of the Linux kernel, which will be much faster:

    $ make linux-rebuild
    

    As part of this, Buildroot will re-run rsync from our linux/ kernel Git repository to output/build/linux-custom/, so that we really build the latest version of our code, which includes our Device Tree change.

    However, this just rebuilds the Linux kernel, and not the complete SD card image, so also run:

    $ make
    

    To regenerate the SD card image, write it on your SD card, and boot your system.

    Testing the sensor

    After booting the system, if we check /sys/bus/i2c/devices, a new entry has appeared:

    lrwxrwxrwx    1-0076 -> ../../../devices/platform/soc/40015000.i2c/i2c-1/1-0076
    

    If we following this symbolic link, we can see a number of interesting information:

    # ls -l /sys/bus/i2c/devices/1-0076/
    total 0
    lrwxrwxrwx    driver -> ../../../../../../bus/i2c/drivers/bmp280
    drwxr-xr-x    iio:device2
    -r--r--r--    modalias
    -r--r--r--    name
    lrwxrwxrwx    of_node -> ../../../../../../firmware/devicetree/base/soc/i2c@40015000/pressure@76
    drwxr-xr-x    power
    lrwxrwxrwx    subsystem -> ../../../../../../bus/i2c
    -rw-r--r--    uevent
    

    Here we can see that this device is bound with the device driver named bmp280, and that its Device Tree node is base/soc/i2c@40015000/pressure@76.

    Now, to actually use the sensor, we need to understand what is the user-space interface provided by IIO devices. The kernel documentation gives some hints:

    There are two ways for a user space application to interact with an IIO driver.

    • /sys/bus/iio/iio:deviceX/, this represents a hardware sensor and groups together the data channels of the same chip.
    • /dev/iio:deviceX, character device node interface used for buffered data transfer and for events information retrieval.

    So, we’ll try to explore the /sys/bus/iio/ option:

    # ls -l /sys/bus/iio/devices/
    total 0
    lrwxrwxrwx    iio:device0 -> ../../../devices/platform/soc/48003000.adc/48003000.adc:adc@0/iio:device0
    lrwxrwxrwx    iio:device1 -> ../../../devices/platform/soc/48003000.adc/48003000.adc:adc@100/iio:device1
    lrwxrwxrwx    iio:device2 -> ../../../devices/platform/soc/40015000.i2c/i2c-1/1-0076/iio:device2
    lrwxrwxrwx    iio:device3 -> ../../../devices/platform/soc/48003000.adc/48003000.adc:temp/iio:device3
    lrwxrwxrwx    trigger0 -> ../../../devices/platform/soc/40004000.timer/trigger0
    

    Here we can see a number of IIO devices: our IIO device is iio:device2, as can be seen by looking at the target of the symbolic links. The other ones are IIO devices related to the ADC on the STM32 processor. Let’s check what we have inside /sys/bus/iio/devices/iio:device2/:

    # ls -l /sys/bus/iio/devices/iio\:device2/
    total 0
    -r--r--r--    dev
    -rw-r--r--    in_humidityrelative_input
    -rw-r--r--    in_humidityrelative_oversampling_ratio
    -rw-r--r--    in_pressure_input
    -rw-r--r--    in_pressure_oversampling_ratio
    -r--r--r--    in_pressure_oversampling_ratio_available
    -rw-r--r--    in_temp_input
    -rw-r--r--    in_temp_oversampling_ratio
    -r--r--r--    in_temp_oversampling_ratio_available
    -r--r--r--    name
    lrwxrwxrwx    of_node -> ../../../../../../../firmware/devicetree/base/soc/i2c@40015000/pressure@76
    drwxr-xr-x    power
    lrwxrwxrwx    subsystem -> ../../../../../../../bus/iio
    -rw-r--r--    uevent
    

    This is becoming interesting! We have a number of files that we can read to get the humidity, pressure, and temperature:

    # cat /sys/bus/iio/devices/iio\:device2/in_humidityrelative_input 
    49147
    # cat /sys/bus/iio/devices/iio\:device2/in_pressure_input 
    101.567167968
    # cat /sys/bus/iio/devices/iio\:device2/in_temp_input 
    24380
    

    Now, let’s check the kernel documentation at Documentation/ABI/testing/sysfs-bus-iio to understand the units used in these files:

    What:		/sys/bus/iio/devices/iio:deviceX/in_tempX_input
    Description:
    		Scaled temperature measurement in milli degrees Celsius.
    
    What:		/sys/bus/iio/devices/iio:deviceX/in_pressure_input
    Description:
    		Scaled pressure measurement from channel Y, in kilopascal.
    
    What:		/sys/bus/iio/devices/iio:deviceX/in_humidityrelative_input
    Description:
    		Scaled humidity measurement in milli percent.
    

    So here we are: we are able to read the data from our sensor, and the Linux kernel driver does all the conversion work to convert the raw values from the sensors into usable values in meaningful units.

    Turning our kernel change into a patch

    Our Device Tree change is for now only located in our local Linux kernel Git repository: if another person builds our Buildroot configuration, he won’t have access to this Linux kernel Git repository, which Buildroot knows about thanks to the LINUX_OVERRIDE_SRCDIR variable. So what we’ll do now is to generate a Linux kernel patch that contains our Device Tree change, add it to Buildroot, and ask Buildroot to apply it when building the Linux kernel. Let’s get started.

    First, go in your Linux kernel Git repository in linux/, review your Device Tree change with git diff, and if everything is alright, make a commit out of it:

    $ git commit -as -m "ARM: dts: add support for BME280 sensor on STM32MP157 DK2"
    

    Then, generate a patch out of this commit:

    $ git format-patch HEAD^
    

    This will create a file called 0001-ARM-dts-add-support-for-BME280-sensor-on-STM32MP157-.patch that contains our Device Tree change.

    Now, back in Buildroot in the buildroot/ folder, create the board/stmicroelectronics/stm32mp157-dk/patches/ folder and a sub-directory board/stmicroelectronics/stm32mp157-dk/patches/linux. Copy the patch into this folder, so that the file hierarchy looks like this:

    $ tree board/stmicroelectronics/stm32mp157-dk/
    board/stmicroelectronics/stm32mp157-dk/
    ├── genimage.cfg
    ├── linux.config
    ├── overlay
    │   └── boot
    │       └── extlinux
    │           └── extlinux.conf
    ├── patches
    │   └── linux
    │       └── 0001-ARM-dts-add-support-for-BME280-sensor-on-STM32MP157-.patch
    ├── readme.txt
    └── uboot-fragment.config
    

    Now, run Buildroot’s menuconfig:

    $ make menuconfig
    

    And in Build options, set global patch directories to the value board/stmicroelectronics/stm32mp157-dk/patches/. This tells Buildroot to apply patches located in this folder whenever building packages. This way, when the linux package will be built, our patch in board/stmicroelectronics/stm32mp157-dk/patches/linux/ will be applied.

    We can now remove the local.mk file to disable the pkg_OVERRIDE_SRCDIR mechanism, and ask Buildroot to rebuild the Linux kernel:

    $ rm local.mk
    $ make linux-dirclean
    $ make
    

    If you pay attention to the Linux kernel build process, you will see that during the Patching step, our Device Tree patch gets applied:

    >>> linux custom Patching
    
    Applying 0001-ARM-dts-add-support-for-BME280-sensor-on-STM32MP157-.patch using patch: 
    patching file arch/arm/boot/dts/stm32mp157c-dk2.dts
    

    You can of course reflash the SD card at the end of the build, and verify that everything still works as expected.

    Let’s save our Buildroot configuration change:

    $ make savedefconfig
    

    And commit our Buildroot changes:

    $ git add board/stmicroelectronics/stm32mp157-dk/linux.config
    $ git add board/stmicroelectronics/stm32mp157-dk/patches/
    $ git add configs/stm32mp157_dk_defconfig
    $ git commit -s -m "configs/stm32mp157_dk: enable support for BME280 sensor"
    

    We can now share our Buildroot change with others: they can build our improved system which has support for the BME280 sensor.

    Conclusion

    You can find the exact Buildroot source code used to reproduce the system used in this article in the branch at 2019.02/stm32mp157-dk-blog-2.

    In this article, we have learned a lot of things:

    • How to connect an I2C sensor to the Discovery board
    • What is the Device Tree, and how it is used to describe devices
    • How to use Buildroot’s pkg_OVERRIDE_SRCDIR mechanism
    • How to enable the I2C bus in the Device Tree and test its operation using i2cdetect and i2cget
    • How to change the Linux kernel configuration to enable a new driver
    • How to interact using sysfs with a sensor supported by the IIO subsystem
    • How to generate a Linux kernel patch, and add it into Buildroot

    In our next article, we’ll look at adding support for the Qt5 graphical library into our system, as a preparation to developing a Qt5 application that will display our sensor measurements on the Discovery board screen.

Building a Linux system for the STM32MP1: basic system

As we announced recently, we are going to publish a series of blost post that describes how to build an embedded Linux device based on the STM32MP1 platform, using the Buildroot build system. In this first article, we are going to see how to create a basic Linux system, with minimal functionality. The hardware platform used in these articles is the STM32MP157-DK2.

List of articles in this series:

  1. Building a Linux system for the STM32MP1: basic system
  2. Building a Linux system for the STM32MP1: connecting an I2C sensor
  3. Building a Linux system for the STM32MP1: enabling Qt5 for graphical applications
  4. Building a Linux system for the STM32MP1: setting up a Qt5 application development environment
  5. Building a Linux system for the STM32MP1: developing a Qt5 graphical application
  6. Building a Linux system for the STM32MP1: implementing factory flashing
  7. Building a Linux system for the STM32MP1: remote firmware updates

What is Buildroot?

A Linux system is composed of a potentially large number of software components coming from different sources:

  • A bootloader, typically U-Boot, responsible for doing some minimal HW initialization, loading the Linux kernel and starting it
  • The Linux kernel itself, which implements features such as process management, memory management, scheduler, filesystems, networking stack and of course all device drivers for your hardware platform
  • User-space libraries and applications coming from the open-source community: command line tools, graphical libraries, networking libraries, cryptographic libraries, and more.
  • User-space libraries and applications developed internally, implementing the “business logic” of the embedded system

In order to assemble a Linux system with all those software components, one typically has two main choices:

  • Use a binary distribution, like Debian, Ubuntu or Fedora. Several of these distributions have support for the ARMv7 architecture. The main advantage of this solution is that it is easy: these binary distributions are familiar to most Linux users, they have a nice and easy-to-use package management system, all packages are pre-compiled so it is really fast to generate a Linux system. However, Linux systems generated this way are typically difficult to customize (software components are pre-built, so you cannot easily tweak their configuration to your needs) and difficult to optimize (in terms of footprint or boot time).
  • Use a build system, like Buildroot or Yocto/OpenEmbedded. These build systems build an entire Linux system from source code, which means that it can be highly customized and optimized to your needs. Of course, it is less simple than using a binary distribution and because you are building all components from source code, a non-negligible amount of CPU time will be spent on compiling code.

BuildrootIn this series of blog post, we have chosen to use Buildroot, which is an easy-to-use build system, which is a good match for engineers getting started with embedded Linux. For more general details about Buildroot, you can read the freely available training materials of our Embedded Linux development with Buildroot training course.

Buildroot is a set of Makefiles and script that automates the process of download the source code of the different software components, extract them, configure them, build them and install them. It ultimately generates a system image that is ready to be flashed, and which typically contains the bootloader, the Linux kernel image and the root filesystem. It is important to understand that Buildroot itself does not contain the source code for Linux, U-Boot or any other component: it is only a set of scripts/recipes that describes where to download the source code from, and how to build it.

Principle of an embedded Linux build system

Building the minimal system with Buildroot

Let’s started by getting the source of Buildroot from its upstream Git repository:

git clone git://git.buildroot.net/buildroot
cd buildroot

Starting a Buildroot configuration is then typically done by running make menuconfig, and then selecting all the relevant options for your system. Here, we are instead going to use a pre-defined configuration that we created for the STM32MP157-DK2 platform. This pre-defined configuration has been submitted to the upstream Buildroot project, but has not yet been merged as of this writing, so we’ll use an alternate Git branch:

git remote add tpetazzoni https://github.com/tpetazzoni/buildroot.git
git fetch tpetazzoni
git checkout -b stm32mp157-dk2 tpetazzoni/2019.02/stm32mp157-dk

The 2019.02/stm32mp157-dk branch in your author’s Buildroot Git repository is based on upstream Buildroot 2019.02.x branch and contains 4 additional patches needed to support the STM32MP157-DK2 platform.

Let’s continue by telling Buildroot to load the pre-defined configuration for the STM32MP157-DK2:

make stm32mp157_dk_defconfig

We could start the build right away, as this configuration works fine, but to illustrate how to modify the configuration (and speed up the build!) we will adjust one aspect of the system configuration. To do so, let’s run Buildroot’s menuconfig. People who have already configured the Linux kernel should be familiar with the tool, as it is the exact same configuration utility.

make menuconfig

At this point, if the command fails due to the ncurses library being missing, make sure to install the libcnurses-dev or ncurses-devel package on your Linux distribution (the exact package name depends on the distribution you’re using).

Once in menuconfig, go to the Toolchain sub-menu. By default the Toolchain type is Buildroot toolchain. Change it to External toolchain by pressing the Enter key. When Buildroot toolchain is selected, Buildroot builds its own cross-compiler, which takes quite some time. Selecting External toolchain tells Buildroot to use a pre-existing cross-compiler, which in our case is the one provided by ARM for the ARMv7 architecture.

Exit menuconfig and save the configuration. It is now time to start the build by running make. However, your author generally likes to keep the output of the build in a log file, using the following incantation:

make 2>&1 | tee build.log

Now that Buildroot starts by checking if your system has a number of required packages installed, and will abort if not. Please follow section System requirements > Mandatory packages of the Buildroot manual to install all the appropriate dependencies. Restart the make command once all dependencies have been installed.

The build process took 10 minutes on your author’s machine. All the build output is conveniently grouped in the sub-directory named output/, in which the most important results are in output/images/:

  • output/images/zImage is the Linux kernel image
  • output/images/stm32mp157c-dk2.dtb is the Device Tree Blob, i.e the piece of data that describes to the Linux kernel the hardware it is running on. We’ll talk more about Device Tree in the second blog post of this series
  • output/images/rootfs.{ext4,ext2} is the image of the root filesystem, i.e the filesystem that contains all the user-space libraries and applications. It’s using the ext4 filesystem format, which is the de-facto standard filesystem format in Linux for block storage.
  • output/images/u-boot-spl.stm32 is the first stage bootloader
  • output/images/u-boot.img is the second stage bootloader
  • output/images/sdcard.img is a complete, ready-to-use SD card image, which was generated from the previous images

Flashing and testing the system

First things first, we’ll need to write sdcard.img to a microSD card:

sudo dd if=output/images/sdcard.img of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1M conv=fdatasync status=progress

Of course, make sure that, on your system, the microSD card is really identified as /dev/mmcblk0. And beware that all the data on your microSD card will be lost!

Insert the microSD card in the microSD card connector of the STM32MP157-DK2 board, i.e connector CN15.

Connect a USB to micro-USB cable between your PC and the connector labeled ST-LINK CN11 on the board. A device called /dev/ttyACM0 will appear on your PC, through which you’ll be able to access the board’s serial port. Install and run a serial port communication program on your PC, your author’s favorite is the very minimalistic picocom:

picocom -b 115200 /dev/ttyACM0

Finally, power up the board by connecting a USB-C cable to connector PWR_IN CN6. You should then see a number of messages on the serial port, all the way up to Buildroot login:. You can then login with the root user, no password will be requested.

STM32MP157-DK2 in situation

How is the system booting ?

Let’s look at the main steps of the boot process, by studying the boot log visible on the serial port:

U-Boot SPL 2018.11-stm32mp-r2.1 (Apr 24 2019 - 10:37:17 +0200)

This message is printed by the first stage bootloader, i.e the code contained in the file u-boot-spl.stm32, compiled as part of the U-Boot bootloader. This first stage bootloader is directly loaded by the STM32MP157 system-on-chip. This first stage bootloader must be small enough to fit inside the STM32MP157 internal memory.

U-Boot 2018.11-stm32mp-r2.1 (Apr 24 2019 - 10:37:17 +0200)

This message is printed by the second stage bootloader, which was loaded from storage into external memory by the first stage bootloader. This second stage bootloader is the file u-boot.img, which was also compiled as part of the U-Boot bootloader.

Retrieving file: /boot/zImage
Retrieving file: /boot/stm32mp157c-dk2.dtb

These messages are printed by the second stage bootloader: we see it is loading the Linux kernel image (file zImage) and the Device Tree Blob describing our hardware platform (file stm32mp157c-dk2.dtb). It indicates that U-Boot has loaded both files into memory: it is now ready to start the Linux kernel.

Starting kernel ...

This is the last message printed by U-Boot before jumping into the kernel.

[    0.000000] Booting Linux on physical CPU 0x0
[    0.000000] Linux version 4.19.26 (thomas@windsurf) (gcc version 8.2.1 20180802 (GNU Toolchain for the A-profile Architecture 8.2-2018.11 (arm-rel-8.26))) #1 SMP PREEMPT Wed Apr 24 10:38:00 CEST 2019

And immediately after that, we have the first messages of the Linux kernel, showing the version of Linux and the date/time it was built. Numerous other kernel messages are then displayed, until:

[    3.248315] VFS: Mounted root (ext4 filesystem) readonly on device 179:4.

This message indicates that the kernel has mounted the root filesystem. After this point, the kernel will start the first user-space process, so the next messages are user-space services being initialized:

Starting syslogd: OK
[...]
Welcome to Buildroot
buildroot login: 

Until we reach a login prompt.

Exploring the system

After logging in as root, you have access to a regular Linux shell, with most basic Linux commands available. You can run ps to see the processes, run ls / to see the contents of the root filesystem, etc.

You can also play a bit with the hardware, for example to turn on and off one of the LEDs of the board:

echo 255 > /sys/class/leds/heartbeat/brightness
echo 0 > /sys/class/leds/heartbeat/brightness

Understanding the Buildroot configuration

So far, we have used a pre-defined Buildroot configuration, without really understanding what it does and how it built this basic system for our board. So let’s go back in make menuconfig and see how Buildroot was configured.

In the Target options menu, obviously the ARM Little Endian architecture was chosen, and more specifically Cortex-A7 was chosen as the Target Architecture Variant. Indeed the entire Linux system runs on the Cortex-A7 cores.

In the Build options menu, nothing was changed from the default values.

In the Toolchain menu, we previously modified to use an External toolchain to use a pre-existing cross-compiler and save on build time. All other options were kept as their default.

In the System configuration menu, we defined the following things:

  • Root filesystem overlay directories is set to board/stmicroelectronics/stm32mp157-dk/overlay/. This option tells Buildroot that the contents of the board/stmicroelectronics/stm32mp157-dk/overlay/ directory must be copied into the root filesystem at the end of the build. It allows to add custom files to the root filesystem.
  • Custom scripts to run after creating filesystem images is set to support/scripts/genimage.sh and the related option Extra arguments passed to custom scripts is set to -c board/stmicroelectronics/stm32mp157-dk/genimage.cfg. This tells Buildroot to call this genimage.sh script at the very end of the build: its purpose is to generate the final SD card image we have used.

In the Kernel menu, we have obviously configured which Linux kernel version and configuration should be used:

  • We are downloading the Linux kernel source code as a tarball from Github, using a custom Buildroot macro called github. Based on this information, Buildroot will go to the Git repository at https://github.com/STMicroelectronics/linux/, and get the kernel version identified by the tag v4.19-stm32mp-r1.2
  • Configuration file path is set to board/stmicroelectronics/stm32mp157-dk/linux.config. This is the file that contains the kernel configuration. We have prepared a custom kernel configuration to have a simple but working kernel configuration. Of course, it can be adjusted to your needs, as we will demonstrate in the next blog post.
  • We enabled the option Build a Device Tree Blob (DTB) and set In-tree Device Tree Source file names to stm32mp157c-dk2. This tells Buildroot to build and install the Device Tree Blob that matches our hardware platform.
  • Finally, we enabled Install kernel image to /boot in target, so that the kernel image and the Device Tree blob are installed inside the /boot directory in the root filesystem. Indeed, our U-Boot configuration will load them from here (see below).

In the Target packages menu, we have kept the default: only the BusyBox package is enabled. BusyBox is a very popular tool in the embedded Linux ecosystem: it provides a lightweight replacement for a Linux shell and most common Linux command line tools (cp, mv, ls, vi, wget, tar, and more). Our basic system in fact only contains BusyBox!

In the Filesystem images menu, we have enabled the ext2/3/4 root filesystem type and chosen the ext4 variant. As explained above, ext4 is kind of the de-facto standard Linux filesystem for block storage devices such as SD cards.

In the Bootloaders menu, we enabled U-Boot, where a significant number of options need to be tweaked:

  • We download U-Boot from a STMicroelectronics Git repository at https://github.com/STMicroelectronics/u-boot.git and use the Git tag v2018.11-stm32mp-r2.1.
  • This U-Boot comes with a pre-defined configuration called stm32mp15_basic, which we select using Board defconfig.
  • However, it turns out that this pre-defined configuration enables the STM32 watchdog, and since our Linux user-space does not have a watchdog daemon to tick the watchdog regularly, it would reset constantly. Using a small additional snippet of U-Boot configuration, stored in the file board/stmicroelectronics/stm32mp157-dk/uboot-fragment.config, we disable the watchdog. Of course, it should be re-enabled and properly handled in Linux user-space for a final product.
  • In the U-Boot binary format sub-menu, we tell Buildroot that the second stage bootloader image will be called u-boot.img, and this is the one Buildroot should install in output/images
  • We tell Buildroot that our U-Boot configuration will build a first stage bootloader called spl/u-boot-spl.stm32, which allows Buildroot to install it in output/images
  • Finally, we pass a custom DEVICE_TREE=stm32mp157c-dk2 option in the U-Boot environment, which is needed for the U-Boot build process to find the Device Tree used internally by U-Boot.

Finally, in the Host utilities menu, we enable the host genimage package.

This entire configuration is saved in a simple text file called configs/stm32mp157_dk_defconfig, which is the one we loaded initially when running make stm32mp157_dk_defconfig. We suggest you take a moment to look at configs/stm32mp157_dk_defconfig and see the configuration options it defines.

What happens during the Buildroot build?

With all these options in place, here is what Buildroot has done to build our system (we have omitted some intermediate steps or package dependencies for the sake of brievity):

  1. Download and install the pre-built ARM compiler from ARM’s website, and install the C and C++ libraries inside the target root filesystem
  2. Download the Linux kernel source code from STMicroelectronics Github repository, configure it with our configuration file, build it, install zImage and stm32mp157c-dk2.dtb both in output/images and in the target root filesystem in the /boot directory. It also installs the Linux kernel modules inside the target root filesystem
  3. Download the U-Boot source code from STMicroelectronics Github repository, configure it, build it and install u-boot-spl.stm32 and u-boot.img in output/images
  4. Download the Busybox source code from the project official website, configure it, build it and install it inside the target root filesystem.
  5. Copies the contents of the rootfs overlay inside the target root filesystem
  6. Produce the ext4 image of the root filesystem, and install it as output/images/rootfs.ext4
  7. Call the genimage.sh script, whose purpose is to generate the final SD card image, output/images/sdcard.img

Let’s now have a look at the file board/stmicroelectronics/stm32mp157-dk/genimage.cfg, which tells the genimage utility how to create the final SD card image:

image sdcard.img {
        hdimage {
                gpt = "true"
        }

        partition fsbl1 {
                image = "u-boot-spl.stm32"
        }

        partition fsbl2 {
                image = "u-boot-spl.stm32"
        }

        partition uboot {
                image = "u-boot.img"
        }

        partition rootfs {
                image = "rootfs.ext4"
                partition-type = 0x83
                bootable = "yes"
                size = 256M
        }
}

What this file says is:

  • We want to create a file named sdcard.img
  • This file will contain a number of partitions, described by a GPT partition table. This is necessary for the STM32MP157 built-in ROM code to find the first stage bootloader.
  • The first two partitions are named fsbl1 and fsbl2, and contain the raw binary of the first stage bootloader, i.e there is no filesystem in those partitions. it is the STM32MP157 built-in ROM code that is hardcoded to search the first stage bootloader in the first two partitions whose name start with fsbl.
  • The third partition named uboot contains the second stage bootloader, also as a raw binary (no filesystem). Indeed, the first stage bootloader is configured to search the second bootloader from the third partition of the SD card (this is defined in the U-Boot configuration and can be modified if needed)
  • The fourth partition contains the ext4 filesystem image that Buildroot has produced, which is in fact our Linux root filesystem, with BusyBox, the standard C/C++ libraries and the Linux kernel image and Device Tree Blob.

This last partition is marked bootable. This is important because the U-Boot configuration for the STM32MP157 hardware platform by default uses the U-Boot Generic Distro Concept. At boot, U-Boot will search for the partition marked bootable, and then inside the filesystem contained in this partition, look for the file /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf to know how to boot the system.

This file extlinux.conf is inside our root filesystem overlay at board/stmicroelectronics/stm32mp157-dk/overlay/boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf, so it is installed in our root filesystem as /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf so that U-Boot finds it. This file simply contains:

label stm32mp15-buildroot
  kernel /boot/zImage
  devicetree /boot/stm32mp157c-dk2.dtb
  append root=/dev/mmcblk0p4 rootwait

Which tells U-Boot that the kernel image to load is /boot/zImage, that the Device Tree Blob to use is /boot/stm32mp157c-dk2.dtb and that the string root=/dev/mmcblk0p4 rootwait must be passed as arguments to the Linux kernel when booting. The root=/dev/mmcblk0p4 is particularly important, because it is the one telling the Linux kernel where the root filesystem is located.

So, if we summarize the boot process of our hardware platform with those new details in mind, it looks like this:

  1. The STM32MP157 built-in ROM code looks for the GPT partitions whose name start with fsbl, and if one is found, loads the contents into the STM32 internal memory and runs it. This is our first stage bootloader.
  2. This first stage bootloader is hard-coded to load the second stage bootloader from the third partition of the SD card. So it initializes the external RAM, loads this second stage bootloader into external RAM and runs it.
  3. The second stage bootloader does some more initialization, and then looks for a partition marked bootable. It finds that the fourth partition is bootable. It loads the /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf file, thanks to which it learns where the kernel and Device Tree are located. It loads both, and starts the kernel with the arguments also specified in the extlinux.conf file.
  4. The Linux kernel runs, up to the point where it mounts the root filesystem, whose location is indicated by the root=/dev/mmcblk0p4 argument. After mounting the root filesystem, the kernel starts the first user-space process.
  5. The first user-space process that runs is /sbin/init, implemented by BusyBox. It starts a small number of services, and then starts the login prompt.

Conclusion

You can find the exact Buildroot source code used to reproduce the system used in this article in the branch at 2019.02/stm32mp157-dk-blog-1.

In this long initial blog post, we have learned what Buildroot is, how to use it to build a basic system for the STM32MP157 platform, how the Buildroot configuration was created, and how the STM32MP157 platform is booting.

Stay tuned for the next blog post, during which we will learn how to plug an additional device to the board: a pressure, temperature and humdity sensor connected over I2C, and how to make it work with Linux.

Embedded Linux system development course on STM32MP1 Discovery

Embedded Linux system developmentFor many years, Bootlin has been offering an Embedded Linux system development training course, which has been delivered world-wide to hundreds of engineers by Bootlin trainers. This course is the most appropriate one for engineers getting started with embedded Linux: it goes through all the software layers of an embedded Linux system, from the toolchain to the application, through the bootloader, Linux kernel and basic user-space. With numerous hands-on labs, attendees get practical experience during this training, and learn how to build their embedded Linux system from the ground-up.

This course has been available for a while in two variants:

  • A 5-day variant, which covers all topics, including flash storage and filesystems as well as-real time
  • A 4-day variant, which is identical to the 5-day variant, except that flash storage and filesystem and real-time are not covered

Embedded Linux system developmentToday, we are happy to announce that all the practical labs of our 4-day variant are now done on the recently announced STM32MP157 Discovery board, which uses the STM32MP157 processor from STMicroelectronics. This processor has a number of interesting features for a large number of embedded applications, as we discussed in a previous blog post.

Just like for all our training courses, the training materials for this course are publicly and freely available:

Bootlin trainers are available to deliver this course on-site anywhere in the world. See this page for more details.