Calxeda Energycore (HighBank)
The EnergyCore ECX-1000 Series is a family of SoC (Server-on-Chip) products that bring the power efficiency of ARM processors to the datacenter. The ECX-1000′s have an integrated 80Gb EnergyCore Fabric Switch, advanced power/systems management with the on-chip EnergyCore Management Engine, and a slew of I/O options.
For more information on the Calxeda EnergyCore processor, please visit their website.
Using Anaconda to install on Calxeda Energycore (HighBank)
The Calxeda Energycore (HighBank) system supports PXE-boot and may install Fedora using Anaconda and Kickstart. This guide will give you detailed instructions on how to perform the installation including the setup required to perform a PXE-boot and kickstart install.
How to set up the server (DHCP/TFTPBoot/PXE) is covered in other Fedora documentation, and is not specific to ARM, so it will not be covered in this document.
The ARM installation tree is included in the Fedora 18 ARM Beta release and can be found on all yum repositories.
An example PXE-boot config file is:
menu title Highbank Boot Options default Highbank-Install prompt 1 timeout 100 label Highbank-Install kernel f18-highbank/vmlinuz-highbank initrd f18-highbank/initrd-highbank.img append console=ttyAMA0 ip=eth0:dhcp ks=http://<ServerPathToKickstartConfig>/highbank.ks rd.debug rd.shell cmdline
By default, this file should be placed in the pxelinux.cfg directory and named 01-<MAC Address>, all lower case, for example:
MAC=00-50-43-9e-17-28 -> FileName=01-00-50-43-9e-17-28
however U-Boot will also search for alternate file names, including a hexidecimal representation of the system's IP address.
Since this is still a work in progress, command line options rd.debug and rd.shell were added to support debugging. The cmdline option will prevent ncurses-type dialogs from being displayed on the serial console during the installation.
A copy the kernel and initrd image files from the install tree in the yum repo, along with the kickstart config file, should be copied to the PXE/tftpboot server, i.e.,
/tftpboot/f17-highbank/
highbank.ks
initrd-highbank.img
vmlinuz-highbank
uImage-highbank
uInitrd-highbank
The kickstart config file could reside elsewhere, but it was included here with the other images, just to keep things together. This implies that the tftpboot directory is also accessible via http.
The current version of U-Boot on Highbank defaults to using 'bootz' instead of 'bootm' for PXE-booting, therefore the 'raw' images need to be copied to the server. The version of U-Boot on other systems may have the opposite default (use U-Boot wrapped images). Both versions of the kernel and initrd are provided in the images/pxeboot directory of the install tree and may be copied to the server.
Please use this example F17-highbank.ks file as a base for test installations. By default it points to the public yum repository and install tree.
To boot to the PXE install image, interrupt the autoboot on the system and perform a PXE-boot. For convenience a script can be defined to do this, if one does not already exist, for example:
bootcmd_pxe=setenv autoload no; dhcp; pxe get; pxe boot;
It can then be automatically performed on boot, or run manually, for example:
run bootcmd_pxe
U-Boot should display the boot menu defined in the PXE config file for the system. Once the default is selected (or autoboots) the kickstart install should begin. This may take a long time, and since it is command line driven (kickstart via serial console) there is not much feedback. Be patient. Depending on the system and network performance the installation may take more than an hour.
This will wipe out anything on the hard drive in order to perform the new installation. It is not interactive, and no prompts or warnings will be provided. Only run this on a 'scratch' system for installation testing.
Quick Setup Notes for using the public FTP server
Red Hat is currently providing a public FTP server with the Fedora repositories at ftp://ftp.ges.redhat.com. This repository can be used for quick testing of PXE configuration using the example kickstart file provided (above).
When setting up a PXE server and an install instance for use with the public FTP server, use: ftp://ftp.ges.redhat.com/pub/fedora-secondary/releases/17/Everything/armhfp/os/images/pxeboot/vmlinuz-highbank and ftp://ftp.ges.redhat.com/pub/fedora-secondary/releases/17/Everything/armhfp/os/images/pxeboot/initrd-highbank.img for the kernel and initrd files, respectively. Append "ip=eth0:dhcp" to the kernel command line for the initial PXE boot.
