Overview

Baserock

Baserock is an open source project which integrates a set of open source and free software components into complete custom operating systems.

It combines elements of a Linux distro, build system, a workflow and a development environment all in one. It is designed for bootstrapping, developing and maintaining custom Linux systems.

https://wiki.baserock.org/

Project

This specific project is a set of instructions on how to boot a Baserock development system on the Cyclone V development kit.

You will need an SD card of at least 8GB in size, on which all data will be erased.

Guide

Instructions

1. Download the SD image:

wget http://download.codethink.co.uk/baserock-altera-cyclone5-build-system-sdimage.tar.gz

2. Insert a blank SD card into your computer's SD card reader

3. Find the name of the SD card

Ensure you know the name of the device node for the SD card you have inserted before running the following commands. The device node willusually be called '/dev/sdX', where X is a letter, or '/dev/mmcblkN', where N is a number.

The name of the device node can be determined by checking one of the following, before and after inserting the card.

dmesg | tail
cat /proc/partitions
sudo fdisk -l

Alternatively, read the name from a graphical tool, such as GNOME's 'Disks' tool, or gparted.

Ensure you do not run the following commands using another device name, such as your computer's hard drive, as this will lead to data loss.

Replace '/dev/sdX' in all of the commands below with the name of the device node of the SD card.

4. Zero out the bootable area on the SD card:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=1M count=16

5. Transfer the image to the SD card:

tar xzOf baserock-altera-cyclone5-build-system-sdimage.tar.gz | sudo dd of=/dev/sdX bs=1M

This command will run for anything up to 20 minutes, and will not produce any output while it is transferring data to the SD card.

6. Sync to ensure writing is complete:

sudo sync

7. Ensure that all partitions on the SD card are umounted, incase the OS has automatically mounted any of them:

sudo umount /dev/sdX*

8. Insert the SD card into the development board

9. Apply power to the development board

Wait for boot messages and log in with user 'root', there is no password

System high-level description

The Baserock system image is a development system and so contains tools needed to modify and build new software.

The system is running Linux kernel v4.1-rc4 in little endian mode.

Further steps

From this point a user can modify and add components, build and deploy a new system using the Baserock workflow. Instructions on how to do these things can be found here https://wiki.baserock.org/guides/

Baserock's build system builds natively. So for targeting the Cyclone V dev kit, you will need to build on a high power ARM device.

Support

For support, the Baserock open-source project can be contacted:

• via email on the public mailing list baserock-dev@baserock.org. We recommend subscribing to the list
• via IRC on the #baserock channel on freenode