
TS-7300 MANUAL
GETTING STARTED & SOFTWARE
The new SD image will look at the state of jumper 6. If jumper 6 is on, the full Debian
bootup will be bypassed and the system will instead drop straight to a shell prompt. 1.69
seconds after power-on the serial console prompt is active and 2.41 seconds after power-
on the video console is displayed. Video takes a bit longer to start up due to the fact that
the FPGA must be initialized, a splash screen is displayed, and USB keyboard kernel
modules must be loaded. To initiate a full Debian startup, simply type "exit" at either the
shell prompt on the serial port or the shell prompt on the VGA monitor (using keyboard).
The time it takes for bootup is also displayed right before the SH prompt is printed. On
new Rev C CPLD TS-7300's, the CPLD has a 32-bit counter that starts at 0 at poweron
and is used to measure the bootup time extremely accurately. On other boards, the
EP9302 983Khz debug4 timer is used since it starts out as 0 also, but is slightly less
accurate than the 32-bit 14.7Mhz counter implemented in the new CPLD rev.
If you want something other than a shell prompt running as soon as possible on bootup, it
is possible by editing the /linuxrc2 shell script on the initrd. When you do the fast boot, you
are actually booting to an initrd with the Debian parts of filesystem mounted read-only.
After modifying the /linuxrc2 shell script on the initrd, run the "save" command to save the
initrd back to the SD card, otherwise your changes won't "stick".
The TS-7300 bootup firmware was designed to be much faster than a x86 PC/SBC BIOS.
So even better bootup times can be achieved with an RTOS, such as eCos, instead of
Linux. Of that 1.69s bootup time, about 1.4 represents Linux bootstrap, while about 0.3 of
it is the hardware initialization.
Installation
If you board doesn't have the Fast Bootup firmware installed from factory, proceed as
follow in order to have your TS-7300 upgraded.
The new SD Card image that enables the fast bootup option is available on our FTP site.
Visit our website, TS-7300 page, for further information.
It requires at least a 256MB SD Card. To install it, follow the instructions below:
1. Extract the new SD Card image file, for example:
$ bunzip2 fastboot-7300-sdcard-7-6-2006.dd.bz2
2. Using an SD Card reader and the "dd" utility, copy the image to the disc device
of the 256MB SD Card:
$ dd if=fastboot-7300-sdcard-7-6-2006.dd of=/dev/sda
Or, using the second SD Card slot of your TS-7300:
$ dd if=fastboot-7300-sdcard-7-6-2006.dd of=/dev/sdcard1/disc0/disc
!
Warning
This will completely overwrite the contents of your SD Card, so make
sure you do the appropriate backups before updating.
3. To use the image on a larger card (512MB, for example), just "dd" to the larger
card, use fdisk to increase the size of part3 to the remaining space (taking care
to keep the same start sector), and then use the "ext2resize" command on that
partition:
$ fdisk /dev/sdcard1/disc0/disc
$ ext2resize /dev/sdcard1/disc0/part3
4. To update to the new TS-SDBOOT, download and run (as root) the
TS-SDBOOT update utility binary executable on your TS-7300 board. This utility is
found at our webiste.
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