Network Booting on Beagleboard xM

This may be of interest. It’s possible to boot a riscos rom and load a cmos file stored on the network. Saves having to keep swapping over SD cards all the time. It adds about 20 seconds to the boot time.

You’ll need to download a recent uboot. There’s one here and copy the MLO and u-boot.bin onto an existing SD card. A ‘tftp’ server needs to be available on the same subnet. I’ll assume this is already setup.

Also create a ‘preEnv.txt’ containing,

preenvcmd=setenv bootdelay 0;setenv serverip 192.168.0.1;setenv ipaddr 192.168.0.2

and a ‘uEnv.txt’ containing,

uenvcmd=usb start;tftp 0x4020f000 cmos;tftp 0x81000000 riscos;go 0x81000000

I just realised you can load the ‘cmos’ file this way too. I’ve updated the instructions. You can even use a smartphone as a tftp server. There’s an app for that!

Sounds cool. Are you going to demo this at Wakefield?

I assume this would work over the Internet? (If an IP gateway could be specified)
So in theory, if ROOL had a tftp server, you could always boot the latest ROM image!

In theory you could do this. Instead you could just use wget and create an obey file that does all the fetching, unzip’ing and tftp’ing. I couldn’t find a tftp client or server than runs on RISC OS 5. I’ve done a quick port of both so it’s now possible to do the whole thing on RISC OS if you’ve got more than one machine.

Sounds cool. Are you going to demo this at Wakefield?

It would be easy enough to set up a demonstration.

It sounds like a potentially useful way to ensure that a group of networked boards are all using a specific (read current) version of the OS. Shame about the 20s overhead, but you can’t have everything, I guess!

Shame about the 20s overhead, but you can’t have everything, I guess!

Still quicker than <cough> <cough> ! :-)