Setting up an UP Squared 6000 board for LAVA

These are the instructions to prepare a device for use as a DUT in the Apertis LAVA automated test laboratory. See UP Squared 6000 board setup for the recommended setup for developers’ devices.

Overview

These instructions are to set up a PXE boot server with x86_64 stand-alone GRUB to boot an UP Squared 6000 series board (Intel Atom x6425RE) in LAVA. It will first boot with a kernel over TFTP and an NFS root file system, then deploy a full OS image on an SD card and boot it with GRUB.

Note: Any EFI bootloader included in the OS image will not be used in this scenario. A future improvement would be to make LAVA control the EFI firmware directly rather than GRUB in order to boot from an arbitrary EFI bootloader instead.

PXE boot with GRUB

The first step is to set up the LAVA dispatcher to enable PXE boot with a GRUB binary. There should already be a TFTP server installed as part of the LAVA dispatcher set-up. The same server can be used to provide the PXE boot binary (GRUB).

Create directory /srv/tftp/lava-grub2/x86_64-efi/ on the dispatcher and download the latest GRUB binary to it.

Note: To build the GRUB binary (core.efi) from source:

$ git clone https://gitlab.collabora.com/lava/grub.git
$ cd grub/
$ ./bootstrap
$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure --with-platform=efi --target=x86_64 --disable-werror
$ make
$ make install
$ grub-mkstandalone -O x86_64-efi -o core.efi --modules "tftp net efinet linux efifwsetup part_msdos part_gpt btrfs ext2 fat"

Install dns-masq on the dispatcher:

$ apt install dnsmasq

Make it provide the GRUB binary for UP Squared 6000 boards, in /etc/dnsmasq.d/dhcp.conf:

# UP Squared 6000 (x86_64)
dhcp-vendorclass=pxe-efi-x86_64,PXEClient:Arch:00007
dhcp-boot=tag:pxe-efi-x86_64,lava-grub2/x86_64-efi/core.efi

Device set-up

Use the standard UEFI firmware provided with the UP Squared 6000 boards, with settings reset to the factory defaults.

To configure the serial console, follow the instructions from the UP Squared 6000 setup.

The Network interface needs to be enabled and boot order set to try PXE IPv4/IPv6 first, to make LAVA take the priority over previously installed images on the device. The following steps needs to be configured:

  • Enter BIOS setup pressing <DEL> or <ESC> during boot.
  • Go to tab Advanced -> Network Stack Configuration.
  • Enable option Network Stack.
  • Go to tab Boot -> Boot Option #1.
  • Select option Network:UEFI: PXE for the IPv4/IPv6 variant you use.
  • Press F4 to save and Y to confirm.
  • Exit the menu and restart the system.

This should then automatically try PXE boot and launch GRUB.