a Beaglebone black with attached serial cable in front

In May 2021 I worked through the Buildroot training by Bootlin on a Beaglebone black. This is not the wireless version the lab description expects, but it worked well nonetheless. I enjoyed this very much, the materials from Bootlin are excellent.

At the time they used the older uEnv.txt method for booting. Since I'm also playing with an STM32MP157C-DK2, which uses distro boot, I wanted to switch the Beaglebone black over to also use it, to get a more uniform configuration across my devices.

Distro Boot

Distro boot adapts the configuration file format of Syslinux to also support device trees. It is available in recent versions of U-Boot, here is a complete description.

Distro boot is becoming popular for booting embedded Linux systems, because it decouples the boot loader from the Linux system. It is no longer necessary to fiddle with U-Boot environment variables to tell U-Boot where the Linux kernel image, device tree and root file system are.

The starting point is a configuration file extlinux.conf. More ...