Installing Debian Jessie on an ARM board
Hello!
I am working with a GESBC-9G20u device (which is based on an at91sam9g20
processor and is mostly compatible with he
at91sam9g20ek_nandflash_defconfig kernel configuration).
I have quite limited experience with ARM computers and until now I have
only used tools provided by the board manufacturer. At the moment I want
to install full Debian Jessie distro (not Emdebian) on the ARM board
with external USB hard drive.
I've made a FAT partition with kernel image, which I can successfully
load with `usb start; fatload usb 0 0x21000000 uImage` command and boot
into it.
Second partition on the disk is ext3 partition. I can mount and use it
with `mount /dev/sda2 /mnt` command when my kernel is loaded.
I figured out that in order to use USB drive as my root file system I
have to set bootargs to include "root=/dev/sda2 rootwait".
My question is, how can I launch the Debian installer to install distro
on the /dev/sda2 partition? I've ran across following tutorial[1].
For the prerequisites, my hard drive has more than 1GB space avaailable,
I have the kernel sources, and I am using U-Boot 2013.10 with
USB/FAT/NAND support.
I am able to create compatible uImage using `make ARCH=arm
CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabi-` and `mkimage [...]`
What am I stuck at is how do I get a proper initrd image, how do I load
it into memory and pass to the kernel.
I have found an initrd.gz at [2].
1) Where do I get the correct "-a" and "-e" values to convert initrd.gz
using "mkimage" command?
2) Is the initrd.gz supposed to be used only with the
"vmlinuz-3.16.0-4-versatile" supplied in the same FTP folder? If yes,
how do I convert vmlinuz-3.16.0-4-versatile to be compatible with my ARM
processor?
3) How do I start the kernel with the initrd? What U-Boot
commands/options to use? I've encountered different ways, e.g. using
`bootm <kernel> <initrd>`, using `bootz` command, appending
"initrd=<address>,<size>" to bootargs.
[1]: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Arm/OtherPlatforms
[2]:
http://ftp.fi.debian.org/debian/dists/jessie/main/installer-armel/current/images/versatile/netboot/initrd.gz
I will appreciate any help and experience you've had with installing
Debian on ARM!
Best regards,
Alexey Smishlayev
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