Making qemu images
Preparing flash / disk images for qemu
You need a kernel and root filesystem for your Gumstix board. Additionally, download one of the u-boot images for your platform.
The flash image emulates the flash memory on the Gumstix motherboard. It's a single file that has the size of the emulated flash memory (32MB in the case of the verdex board emulated by qemu). It will contain the same images as the real flash, at the same offsets:
- The u-boot image at offset 0
- The root file system image at offset 256kB
- The kernel image at the end of the image offset 31MB
The following 3 files are needed
- u-boot-verdex-400-r1587.bin - u-boot
- gumstix-basic-image-gumstix-custom-verdex.jffs2 - root file system
- uImage-2.6.21-r1-gumstix-custom-verdex.bin - kernel.
Except for the u-boot image which is not yet built by openembedded, those files can be found in the tmp/deploy/glibc/images/ sub-directory of gumstix-oe after running bitbake.
To assemble the image flash.img run the following commands:
$ dd of=flash.img bs=128k count=256 if=/dev/zero $ dd of=flash.img bs=128k conv=notrunc if=u-boot-verdex-400-r1587.bin $ dd of=flash.img bs=128k conv=notrunc seek=2 if=gumstix-basic-image-gumstix-custom-verdex.jffs2 $ dd of=flash.img bs=128k conv=notrunc seek=248 if=uImage-2.6.21-r1-gumstix-custom-verdex.bin
For Connex boards with 16MB flash the steps slightly differ:
$ dd of=cflash.img bs=128k count=128 if=/dev/zero $ dd of=cflash.img bs=128k conv=notrunc if=u-boot-connex-400-r1604.bin $ dd of=cflash.img bs=128k conv=notrunc seek=2 if=gumstix-basic-image-gumstix-custom-connex.jffs2 $ dd of=cflash.img bs=128k conv=notrunc seek=120 if=uImage-2.6.21-r1-gumstix-custom-connex.bin
Those images are used to emulate the flash memory cards that are present on netmicroSD, netMMC, netCF... expansion boards. It is possible to boot from them or just to store more data in them.
On the Linux host, the losetup(1) utility is used to access those images as real block devices,
/!\ The current qemu version seems to be limited to 1GB card images. The examples presented here will thus use 1GB images.
- Creating the empty image
dd of=mmc.img bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero
- Creating a block device for the whole image
losetup /dev/loop0 mmc.img
- Running fdisk to partition the card
Partitionning the card
In the most simple case, one single partition (VFAT, ext2 or ext3) can cover the whole card. However, in order to boot from the card and use it for the root file system, at least 2 partitions, one small VFAT to hold the kernel and the u-boot script, and a bigger one, ext2 for the root file system. The folloing example shows a basic setup (using fdisk 'p' command):
Command (m for help): p Disk /dev/loop0: 1073 MB, 1073741824 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 130 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Disk identifier: 0x25c4dea4 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/loop0p1 1 7 56196 6 FAT16 /dev/loop0p2 8 130 987997+ 83 Linux
Accessing the partitions
In order to access the partitions, 2 more loop devices have to be created with losetup. The offsets into the main loop device (/dev/loop0) need to be specified. For this, use fdisk -ul to find the starting block of your partitions:
Disk /dev/loop0: 1073 MB, 1073741824 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 130 cylinders, total 2097152 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x25c4dea4 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/loop0p1 63 112454 56196 6 FAT16 /dev/loop0p2 112455 2088449 987997+ 83 Linux
Partition 1 starts at block 63 (which is 63*512 = 32256 bytes) and partition 2 starts at block 112455 (which is 112455*512 = 57576960 bytes).
The following commands will then create the 2 loop devices:
losetup -o 32256 /dev/loop1 /dev/loop0 losetup -o 57576960 /dev/loop2 /dev/loop0
/dev/loop1 and /dev/loop2 will now access the 2 partitions.
Formatting and mounting
The loop device will extend to the end of the image file, even though the partition does not. For this reason it is important to specify the amount of blocks when creating the filesystem. The number of blocks were shown in the previous fdisk output. (Be aware that mkfs may give a warning about a block count mismatch. This is because the loop device may be larger than the partition. In this situation, the warning can be ignored.)
mkfs -t vfat /dev/loop1 56196 mkfs -t ext2 /dev/loop2 987997
mkdir /mnt/1 mkdir /mnt/2
mount /dev/loop1 /mnt/1 mount /dev/loop2 /mnt/2
The kernel image (called uImage on the docs on using root on MMC/SD), the u-boot script gumstix-factory.script are needed on /mnt/1.
To transfer the root filesystem to /mnt/2, un-tar the gumstix-basic-image-gumstix-custom-verdex.tar.gz found in the tmp/deploy/glibc/images/gumstix-custom-verdex/ directory.
Before starting qemu, both partitions should be un-monted and the 3 loop devices should be un-configured. Failing to do that will almost certainly corrupt the images.
umount /mnt/2 umount /mnt/1 losetup -d /dev/loop2 losetup -d /dev/loop1 losetup -d /dev/loop0