Look into booting Linux from SD card

[rmcreyes]

Describe what aspect of our project needs to be researched Look into how we can boot Linux on our DE1s with SD cards.

Additional context Perhaps if you manage to get it working, add some documentation in the README for some gist notes of how to get started?

Please close this ticket either by merging some documentation or leaving comments under this ticket.

[Zhang-Kevin16]

Most of the instructions are found here https://people.ece.cornell.edu/land/courses/ece5760/DE1_SOC/DE1-SoC-UP-Linux/Linux.pdf.

Some things to note:

• The Linux distros can be found at https://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?Language=English&CategoryNo=205&No=836&PartNo=4 at the bottom of the page. Right now I'm using Linux Console so no GUI. Still trying to get it working with Ubuntu.

• When you plug in the USB cable make sure the DE1 side is the port on the left of the USB ports. The UART-USB drivers should have been installed when you installed the DS5 program but can be found at https://ftdichip.com/drivers/vcp-drivers/.

• The switch layout at the bottom of the board is wrong in the manual. From left to right it should be 01010.

PS. USB camera is detected with the console. Still need to check if VNC works with the console. Preferably, I can get the Ubuntu version working soon. Also need to figure out how to interact with the FPGA side.

[Zhang-Kevin16]

So apparently the ON in the previous picture actually doesn't mean ON and actually means 0...

Anyways to load Ubuntu (with GUI) onto the DE1:

1. Download the image
2. Make sure every partition is deleted on the SD Card if you previously already wrote an Linux image to the SD card. This can be done by going to Create and Format hard disk partition.
3. Write Linux image to the SD Card using Win32 Disk Imager.
4. Put SD Card into DE1.
5. Flip all the switches in the image to the ON position (it's actually 0). Basically toggle them UP relative to the orientation of the image.
6. Plug in VGA, mouse, keyboard.
7. Turn on.
8. ???
9. Profit.

[Zhang-Kevin16]

A couple of notes before I forget.

1. The Linux image we use right now is loading its own FPGA system so we can't use our own hardware acceleration yet.
2. We might be able to change the FPGA system by replacing the .rbf file within the FAT32 partition of the SD Card. Haven't tested yet.
3. Since Linux is using virtual memory we can't write to hardcoded addresses like in the CPEN311 lab. What we can do is use mmap to obtain physical memory to virtual memory mappings according to https://people.ece.cornell.edu/land/courses/ece5760/DE1_SOC/DE1-SoC-UP-Linux/Linux.pdf.
   Again this is theoretical and I haven't tried it yet.