Flashing an image onto new devices

Jesse Kaukonen

We are considering the Up Board as a platform for a system we're developing. Initially it seems to be suitable and our tests are working, although we may end up using the more powerful Up2 later.

In order to really make use of this platform in numbers we'd be needing some sort of flashing procedure where we can create an image out of an existing system and easily flash it onto other boards. This way we can create our application on one device and with minimum amount of work duplicate it on a new device, as opposed to having to manually install the OS on the device and go through the whole application installation work with all its dependencies as well as system configuration. We've been working with ubilinux for now.

How should we go about this? Should we:

1. Create our own installer of ubilinux with our modifications? My understanding is that ubilinux is a debian based system, and it's not an entirely trivial process to create an image out of a
running Debian system.
2. Create an image we can manually write over the eMMC inside the board? How would we go about creating this image, and how would we flash it?
3. Manually install the default ubilinux on our devices and create an automated installation script for our system without any flashing gimmics?

Ideally we'd want to minimize the work we have to do per device.

DCleri

Hi Gekko,

Thanks for choosing the UP Board for your project.

The current ubilinux 3.0 is using a modified Debian installer and in order to customize and copy an image, the best way would be to use clonezilla.

We are currently working on ubilinux 4.0 based on Debian Stretch.
This release is not using an installer, but it is based on a basic live system that flashes a pre-built Linux image (based on Debian Stretch) to the eMMC or other media.

The current beta release supports only UP Squared but later in August we will release the final version which will include support for all the UP family (UP Board, UP Squared, UP Core).

With the new approach it will be simple enough to modify the image and include the new one in the image flasher provided.

Jesse Kaukonen

The 4.0 system sounds good. We'll be trying it in August then!

Jesse Kaukonen

With ubilinux 4 released (https://up-community.org/forum/announcements/2248-ubilinux™-4-0,-a-single-linux-distribution-for-up-board,-up-squared-and-up-core,-has-been-released), you now list the image flasher:

"Image Flasher with Automated or Interactive installation options available"

Would you have some instructions for creating an installation image out of the running system and for how those images are to be flashed? We've been using CloneZilla with ubilinux 3, but it's far from optimal.

stez_mind

Any news on this?

See this other related question:

https://forum.up-community.org/discussion/3007/how-to-flash-a-yocto-generated-image-on-emmc#latest

For everyone in needs to deploy projects on multiple boards, this is a must-have feature.

Jesse Kaukonen

We ended up doing this by automating the BIOS updates and using Clonezilla from a server in the local network.

RolandP

@Jesse Kaukonen said:
We ended up doing this by automating the BIOS updates and using Clonezilla from a server in the local network.

Hi Jesse, are you able to share any more detail on your process here? It would be very useful for me also.

Jesse Kaukonen

You can set up a Clonezilla Lite Server on your LAN to wait for clients, then boot the client Upboards with Clonezilla Lite Client to retrieve an image from that server. I wrote down the Clonezilla boot parameters here: https://sourceforge.net/p/clonezilla/discussion/Clonezilla_live/thread/91888fe3/

However, I later realized it's less of a hassle to set up a NFS server in LAN instead of using Clonezilla Lite Server. So simply:

• Set up a NFS: https://wiki.debian.org/NFSServerSetup
• Retrieve Clonezille testing (stable has issues on Upboard) https://clonezilla.org/downloads.php
• Customize the GRUB boot parameters for Clonezilla based on https://clonezilla.org/fine-print-live-doc.php?path=clonezilla-live/doc/99_Misc/00_live-boot-parameters.doc
• Start all Upboards with this Clonezilla image using the custom GRUB menu entry by booting from the USB stick

RolandP

Thanks Jesse, I'll try this out when the time comes!