Linaro Ubuntu 12.09 for i.MX6

This is just a quick post to mention a new Linaro image for i.MX6 that we've placed on-line:

• linaro-12.09.tar.gz

In an earlier post, we described how you can boot a Linaro Ubuntu image in the Linaro fashion. That is to say:

• Placing U-Boot into un-formatted space on SD card, and
• Placing the U-Boot environment into un-formatted space on SD card, and
• Placing the kernel into un-formatted space on SD card.

The Linaro team seems to have stopped creating such images for SABRE Lite though.

This doesn't mean that you can't use a newer release. In the tar-ball above, you'll find a root filesystem from the current latest Linaro image to which we've added:

• A boot script as described in this post, and
• Our latest kernel (in /boot/uImage), and
• Matching kernel modules in /lib/modules

To place it on an SD card, simply format a single partition as ext3 and extract the image:

~/$ wget https://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/boundarydevices.com/linaro-12.09.tar.gz
~/$ sudo mkfs.ext3 -L linaro-12.09 /dev/mmcblk0p1 && sync
# remove and re-insert your SD card
~/$ sudo tar -C /media/linaro-12.09/ -zxvf linaro-12.09.tar.gz

We haven't done a lot of testing of this image, but in a first pass, it seems to be pretty peppy. It booted really fast, and a quick test of Firefox showed better performance than the comparable release of Oneiric from Freescale.