HelenOS on BeagleBoard

Information pertaining to porting HelenOS to the ​BeagleBoard-xM single-board computer.

Status

Supported models:

• BeagleBoard-xM

The BeagleBoard-xM has been supported since HelenOS 0.6.0.

Serial Console

BeagleBoard has a female DB-9 connector, so one can plug a USB-serial adapter with male DB-9 connector straight to it, without any additional cabling (such as a laplink cable).

Comms settings: 115200 bd, 8 data bits, 1 stop bit, no parity, disable hardware flow control.

Only kconsole can be used via the serial console, there is no user-space serial console.

Booting

The BeagleBoard can be either netbooted or booted over serial.

In either case, start by build HelenOS for the arm32/beagleboard target. This produces an uImage.bin binary. You need to use a microSD card with uBoot. uBoot will typically auto-boot from te SD card after a few seconds and you can press a key to interrupt and get a command line.

In order to boot over network, do:

U-Boot# dhcp 192.168.0.108:/helenos/uImage.bin
...
U-Boot# bootm

where 192.168.0.108 is the IP address of the tftpboot server and /helenos/uImage.bin is the path to the HelenOS uboot image relative to the beginning of the tftpboot directory. }}}

Boot over serial takes much longer:

U-Boot# loady   # after this command, start sending the uImage.bin from the terminal program using the ymodem protocol
...
U-Boot# bootm

Display / keyboard

The BeagleBoard-xM has a PS/2 keyboard port, HDMI video output and USB. However, neither PS/2 nor USB is currently supported by HelenOS. TODO What is the state of kfb and amdm37x_dispc?