Early Boot Device Firmware
INTRODUCTION
The C1P9S01 firmware allows device firmware to be installed in the main system PNOR. Device firmware may
be required for add-on card operation in the early boot process.
WARNING:
We strongly recommend that you only use libre device firmware to provide continued security and
stability of the C1P9S01 platform. Depending on the exact kernel drivers and position of the firmware within the
system, firmware components may be able to read and write userspace, kernel, and/or hypervisor data without
detection.
1.8MB of main system PNOR Flash have been reserved for device firmware components, with a partition name
of
BOOTKERNFW
. This partition is shipped blank from the factory, and must be initialized with a squashfs partition
in order to be used. The contents of the
BOOTKERNFW
partition will be mounted on
/lib/firmware
within the
skiroot Linux environment; the location of the files created in the custom squashfs partition should take this into
account.
INSTALLATION
To add a device firmware component to a new squashfs image, place the firmware component(s) you wish to
install in a dedicated directory, for example
/tmp/firmware
. Execute the squashfs image creation command
as follows:
cd /tmp/firmware/
mksquashfs * firmware_squashfs_image.bin -all-root -keep-as-directory
Save the generated
firmware_squashfs_image.bin
file in a location accessible from the main bootloader,
such as
/boot
, then reboot into the main petitboot loader interface. Use the
Exit to Shell
menu option to
get a command prompt. To proceeed, the MTD partition number of the BOOTKERNFW partition must be found.
Execute the following command and note the MTD partition number:
cat /proc/mtd | grep BOOTKERNFW
If the above command does not return a result, please ensure your firmware is up to date. If the issue persists,
contact support.
Erase the BOOTKERNFW partition.
pflash -P BOOTKERNFW -e
Write the JFFS2 image to the MTD partition found above. In this example the partition was
mtd5
, but your
partition may differ.
dd if=/tmp/firmware_jffs_image.bin of=/dev/mtd5 bs=64k
On successful completion of the above command, your firmware partition is ready to use!
REMOVAL
Should you need to erase the firmware partition for any reason, such as faulty firmware preventing the skiroot
© 2017 - 2019 Raptor Computing Systems, LLC
C1P9S01 User's Guide Version 1.00
All Rights Reserved
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