Parallella Photo

This documents my attempt to install Gentoo on my Parallella-16 Desktop SOC that is currently running Ubuntu. I would like a modern kernel and a rolling release, and all hardware working at the end of this effort. Most off the guidance I relied on for this process came from the Parallella1 page of the Gentoo Wiki2

SD Card Layout

The SD card currently used to boot my Parallella-16 has two partitions. The first partition contains the files needed to boot the device and is formatted as vfat consuming 100M of space. The second partition contains the root filesystem, is formatted ext4, and uses the rest of the space on the SD card.

NAME        FSTYPE LABEL UUID                                 MOUNTPOINT
mmcblk0
├─mmcblk0p1 vfat   BOOT  B16C-0E88			      /boot
└─mmcblk0p2 ext4   root  e2ad8743-bed9-48ab-bcff-4404bf72ce49 /

These are the files stored on the boot partition.

$ tree /boot
/boot
├── build-bootfs.log
├── devicetree.dtb
├── parallella.bit.bin
└── uImage

Boot Process

Firmware (including u-boot, named parallella.bit.bin3), kernel (named uImage) and device tree (named devicetree.dtb) are loaded from the microSD card slot when power is supplied to board.

References

  1. https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Parallella “Parallella” ↩

  2. https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Main_Page “Main Page” ↩

  3. https://github.com/parallella/parabuntu/tree/master/fpga_bitfiles “parallella.bit.bin” ↩