NixOS on ARM/Banana Pi BPI-M5

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Status

Work in progress

Building Amlogic-compatible U-Boot

Building U-Boot

Note: Do not use the severely outdated BPI-M5-bsp or Amlogic-u-boot to build u-boot.

$ git clone git://git.denx.de/u-boot.git
$ cd u-boot
$ nix-shell -p ubootTools gcc-arm-embedded dtc flex bison python swig
$ make -j$(nproc) ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu- bananapi-m5_defconfig
$ make -j$(nproc) ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu-
$ cd ..

Creating Amlogic Package

Note: The following steps require an AMD64 platform.

$ git clone https://github.com/LibreELEC/amlogic-boot-fip
$ cd amlogic-boot-fip
$ mkdir -p output-bananapim5/
$ ./build-fip.sh bananapi-m5 ../u-boot/u-boot.bin output-bananapim5
$ hexdump -C -n 32 output-bananapim5/u-boot.bin | grep "40 41 4d 4c"
$ cd ..

Verify that the new u-boot.bin contains 40 41 4d 4c (@AML) at 0x10 onwards.

Board-specific installation notes

First follow the NixOS_on_ARM instructions to get the SD card image and decompress it.

Once the image has been decompressed, the Amlogic U-Boot package needs to be copied to byte 512+ inside the image (replace the image with the name downloaded and decompressed image):

sudo dd if=amlogic-boot-fip/output-bananapim5/u-boot.bin of=nixos-sd-image-22.11.2620.de5448dab58-aarch64-linux.img conv=fsync,notrunc bs=512 seek=1

Then, copy the image onto the eMMC or sdcard using the the installation steps.

In order to get a serial console output, it is required to replace ttyAMA0 with ttyAML0 in the /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf file inside the image. The easiest way is to just mount the respective folder after the image has been flashed on the SD-card

sudo mount /dev/sdX /mnt/
sudo sed -i 's/ttyAMA0/ttyAML0/g' /mnt/boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf


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