-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 38
Home
The Morty branch is highly experimental. Currently it builds. installs and boots, albeit the separate parts (u-boot, kernel and rootfs) need to be installed manually). The only permanent change is the u-boot update, and that should not affect your ability to run your existing Edison Image. The kernel will be installed in a partition that is currently unused and the rootfs on an external sd card. The home partition is shared between your existing image and the new image. Remember that when you are doing destructive operations in the home directory. To boot, you will need to interrupt u-boot while booting, add some environment variables and then manually boot the new kernel and rootfs. If you don't manually interrupt, your old image will boot.
After boot you can login, connect to ethernet (if you have a supported USB ethernet adapter), connect to wifi, and start securing your device. You need to use a terminal program to connect via USB to the Edison for this. I have used screen and Gnome Terminal (which works a bit better as you have a line buffer that you can scroll up).
To begin with, the Edison allows you only to log in as root, and no root password is set. We all should know what can come of that. To secure the device, as a starting point you probably would like to create a user account, assign that sudo privileges, and configure sshd so that root logins are forbidden. This will still allow you to login via the console (the terminal connected via USB). In case things go wrong, you can take the sd card, plug it in your computer (it is formatted as ext4, so under Windows that might not be so easy) and fix things from there.
If you really mess up the device, for instance by installing a broken u-boot (I did this), or break the u-boot environment variables in such a way that nothing boots, I provide the recovery tools and an image (but you can recover your own if you like). Note that recovery here means recover the Edison so that it will boot again. All the partitions will be wiped, so if you have anything important on the device, you might want to back that up in advance.
Nevertheless, you might find ways to break the Edison that nobody thought off. In that case, I told you so, and you get to keep the pieces.
With that out the way: the original Edison kernel has the same potential to break things, is badly secured and the image software is based on sources that is many years old (i.e. has many known security issues). At least Yocto Morty is being actively maintained. And the kernel applied here is for now not more than 10 weeks behind the latest official Vanilla release.
I am an electronics engineer and one of the owners / directors of Exalon Delft. We develop Intrinsically Safe instrumentation for the Oil & Gas industry (among others). I have a PhD in Smart Capacitive Sensors. I know how to program micro-controllers.
I am not a software engineer, kernel developer and have no relation with Intel. Andy Shevshenko's kernel is my first successful attempt (and certainly not my first) to build a kernel. Never worked with u-boot before and I am overwhelmed by the variables and syntax that Yocto uses.
I am learning by doing and fortunately I'm a quick study. As Sir Isaac Newton has put it: If I have seen further than others it is because I have been standing on the shoulders of Giants. But would I trust me to supply an image for an Edison that is supposed to do anything that could cause lives to be lost or other damages to happen? Of course not.
Compared to the original Edison Images there are features I removed, because they didn't build. And if I have no interest in the feature, fixing it has low priority.
There are also features that do build but don't work fully. MRAA is an example of this. It needs porting and have already started that. Working now: serial port (hsu) and gpio.
And there are features that don't work but I haven't tested yet.
So, if you find a bug, please create an issue on Github. Fixing the issue will of course be quicker if you provide the solution as well. And if you want or need features added, go ahead, fork me, add what you want and send me a pull request.
-
make edison-image based on http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/meta-intel-edison/ that actually builds (done)
-
update http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/meta-intel-iot-middleware/ to the latest version that will build (done)
-
provide a version with PREEMPT_RT kernel (done)
-
fix up QA warnings (done)
-
update poky to morty (done)
-
switch to Andy Shevshenko's kernel https://github.com/andy-shev/linux/tree/eds (done)
This work is in the morty branch and is highly experimental. Read on about what works, what not and how to get this working in Current state of Edison Morty.
-
switch to 64-bit kernel