Beaglebone and Gentoo

Hi all,

Two weeks ago I got a Beaglebone board from the people at Beagleboard.org to create the documentation I always create with every device I get.

Like always i’d like to announce the guide for installing Gentoo in the Beaglebone. Have a look at: http://dev.gentoo.org/~armin76/arm/beaglebone/install.xml . Feel free to send any corrections my way.

The Beaglebone is a bit different from the devices i got lately, as it lacks video out(well, there’s video out with an LCD connector but i lack an LCD screen), and its pretty simple apart from that. One of the big points of the Beaglebone is the price(89$) and the ability of creating addon boards for it, which are already famous amongst the Beagleboard people.

The specs of the Beaglebone are:
# ARMv7-A 500MHz(USB power)/720MHz(PSU power) TI AM3358/9 ARM Cortex-A8 processor
# 256MB DDR2 RAM
# SMSC LAN8710 Ethernet card
#
# 1x microSDHC slot
# 1x USB 2.0 Type-A port
# 1x mini-USB 2.0 OTG port
# 1x RJ45
#
# Reset and user-defined button

Yes, the processor runs at 500MHz when being powered using the mini-USB port, and 720MHz when using a power supply. More info about the specs in Beaglebone’s webpage.

For those curious as me, here’s the bootlog and the cpuinfo.

All the hardware provided by the Beaglebone works fine, except the USB port. But thats due to a bug in the USB driver used on the Beaglebone. The bug appears when you disconnect the first USB device you connect. Once that happens, the USB port won’t recognize any new USB device.

The workaround is to do:
echo F > /proc/driver/musb_hdrc.1

After that, the USB port will work again. This idea comes from the Angstrom people. In the guide i’ve documented an udev rule to workaround this issue, its from Angstrom as well.

I’d like to thank the people at Beagleboard.org for providing me a Beaglebone to document this. Next step is getting everything upstream 🙂

Have fun!