User manual

3 Software Conﬁguration

3. Software Conﬁguration

The OnRISC comes with a preinstalled Debian GNU/Linux on ARM

operating system. The com-

plete system image (see Section 3.7) provides necessary tools and services to start with application

development, various services such as web and mail server, Samba server, etc. For oﬃce tasks it

provides an X-Server with graphical desktop manager and some oﬃce software.

This image can be downloaded from our FTP server and can be copied to the CF/microSD card

via vsimgtool utility or Win32 Disk Imager (see Appendix E.1) under MS Windows or via dd (see

Appendix E.2).

Alternatively Buildroot (Section Section 10) can be used to create the root ﬁle system.

3.1. Booting from CF/microSD

3.1.1. KS8695 based Devices

There are two ﬁles placed under /boot directory on the complete image:

• zImage - kernel to boot

• kparam - kernel parameter

The OnRISC BIOS (refer to Section 8) is searching for these ﬁles to boot the system from an

external medium (Mass storage devices, network etc.). Due to the fact that USB devices need

more time to be detected it is recommended to increase the Start-Timeout value to at least 5

seconds (refer to 8.5). The kernel parameter will be described below:

root= parameter tells kernel from where to take the root ﬁlesystem. If this parameter is not

supplied BIOS

deﬁnes it using the device name containing zImage. So if root ﬁlesystem is on the

same device/partition as the kernel it is recommended not to deﬁne root= parameter.

Example:

Specifying root=/dev/hda1 will mount /dev/hda1 as root ﬁlesystem

Specifying root=/dev/sda1 will mount /dev/sda1 as root ﬁlesystem

If CF card is inserted into the internal CF-Slot and kparam doesn’t supply root= parameter,

/dev/hda1 will be mounted as root ﬁlesystem

rootwait parameter tells kernel to wait till root device appears. This is important for booting

from USB devices, because they will be detected much later than CF. This parameter is integrated

into BIOS since version 2.0.

mem= parameter deﬁnes the amount of RAM that kernel can use. This parameter is integrated

into BIOS since version 2.1, but it can be overridden in the kparam.

http://www.debian.org/ports/arm/

since BIOS version 2.1

May 2014 OnRISC User Manual 16