Building TX6/TXUL Series

Note

Be aware that this part of the documentation describes a legacy and deprecated solution.

For the current solution please go here Mainline Yocto BSP Guide.

We provide a script, karo-nxp-release.sh, that simplifies the setup for our machines. To use the script, the name of the specific machine to be built for needs to be specified as well as the desired graphical backend. The script sets up a directory and the configuration files for the specified machine and backend. [1] It also adds our layer to the bblayers.conf file.

There are different configurations you can choose from.

  • DISTRO configurations:
DISTRO= Description
fsl-imx-x11 X11 graphics are not supported on i.MX 8
fsl-imx-wayland Wayland weston graphics
fsl-imx-xwayland Wayland graphics and X11. X11 applications using EGL are not supported
fsl-imx-fb Frame Buffer graphics - no X11 or Wayland. Frame Buffer is not supported on i.MX 8
  • A list of supported MACHINE configurations:
MACHINE=
tx6q-1030
tx6q-1130
tx6q-1036
tx6q-8037
tx6q-8137
tx6u-8030
tx6u-8130
tx6u-8033
tx6u-8133
tx6s-8034
tx6s-8134
tx6s-8035
tx6s-8135
txul-5010
txul-5011
txul-8013

Use this command to setup your build directory (specify the machine, and the build directory):

MACHINE=<machine> source karo-nxp-release.sh -b <build-dir>

When the script has run, your current directory should have changed to the <build-dir> you chose before.

Example:

MACHINE=txul-5011 source karo-nxp-release.sh -b build-txul-5011

U-Boot Hint

Warning

The current i.MX U-Boot is not working with TX6/TXUL series! You can use a precompiled one from our MFGTools or use the one from the Rocko Guide.

Building the image

Note

Before starting a build, you should consider enabling the SSTATE CACHE to speedup the build process.

See Enable sstate cache 1.

Here are the different images you can build:

Here are the different images you can build:

Image Description Provided by layer
imx-boot U-Boot flashable binary, variant specified with above mentioned UBOOT_CONFIG  
linux-imx Linux Kernel and specified .dtb files only  
core-image-minimal See https://layers.openembedded.org/layerindex/recipe/579/ Poky
core-image-base See https://layers.openembedded.org/layerindex/recipe/584/ Poky
core-image-sato See https://layers.openembedded.org/layerindex/recipe/658/ Poky
fsl-image-machine-test An FSL Community i.MX core image with console environment - no GUI interface. meta-freescale-distro
fsl-image-validation-imx Builds an i.MX image with a GUI without any Qt content. meta-fsl-bsp-release/imx/meta-sdk
fsl-image-qt5-validation-imx Builds an opensource Qt 5 image. These images are only supported for i.MX SoC with hardware graphics. They are not supported on the i.MX 6UltraLite, i.MX 6UltraLiteLite, and i.MX 7Dual. meta-fsl-bsp-release/imx/meta-sdk
fsl-image-qt5 Fsl-image-gui with QT.  
meta-toolchain-qt5 QT 5 Toolchain SDK.  
fsl-image-multimedia    
fsl-image-multimedia-full    
fsl-image-gui Full image with demos and tests, used for testing with graphics, no QT  

Build the kernel image with the following command inside your <build-dir>.

bitbake linux-imx

Note

-I Ignores dependencies. For a full image it is important here to NOT build U-Boot, because this would break the build.

What you have to do is, build the image normally until it breaks in u-boot-imx recipie, and then build it without u-boot:

bitbake core-image-minimal
bitbake -I u-boot -I u-boot-imx core-image-minimal

Restarting a build environment [1]

If a new terminal window is opened or the machine is rebooted after a build directory is set up, the setup environment script should be used to set up the environment variables and run a build again. The full karo-nxp-release.sh is not needed.

You can simply run:

source setup-environment <build-dir>

Image Deployment

After a build is complete, the created image resides in the tmp/deploy/images sub-directory. An image is, for the most part, specific to the machine set in the environment setup. Each image build creates a kernel, and an image type based on the IMAGE_FSTYPES defined in the machine configuration file.

The following files are created for Ka-Ro TX6/TXUL modules when running core-image-minimal:

Filename Content
uImage-<version>-<machine> Kernel uImage
modules-<machine>.tgz Kernel modules
<image>-<machine>.tar.bz2 RFS
*.dtb Devicetree blob

To continue with these images use MFGTool or TFTP boot. UUU is actually not supported for TX6/TXUL!

[1](1, 2) Copied from the official NXP Yocto Project User’s Guide, mentioned above.