Linux 6.17 is out and already running at Root Commit

The first system it’s been running on is this Toradex Verdin iMX8M Mini SOM (below the heat sink!) on the Dahlia Carrier board. I’m using this board for a medical device project at the moment.

Here are my notes for building Linux 6.17 for this device:

• Get the Linux 6.17 sources (through git or tarball)
• sudo apt install clang llvm lld (if necessary)
• In the Linux source directory, run:
  export ARCH=arm64
export LLVM=1
make defconfig
make menuconfig
  In Platform Selection, keep only NXP i.MX SoC support
• make dtbs
make -j16 Image
• Prepare a microSD card with 2 partitions:
  • 1 formatted in FAT32 mode
  • 1 formatted in ext4 (for example), containing a BusyBox based filesystem, or an arm64 filesystem generated by Yocto.
• Copy these files the first partition:
  cp arch/arm64/boot/dts/freescale/imx8mm-verdin-nonwifi-dahlia.dtb /media/$USER/boot
cp arch/arm64/boot/Image /media/$USER/boot
• Eject and plug the SD card in the board, and in U-Boot (assuming it’s already installed on eMMC):
  setenv mainlineboot 'load mmc 1 40000000 Image; load mmc 1 48000000 imx8mm-verdin-nonwifi-dahlia.dtb; booti 40000000 - 48000000'
setenv bootargs 'root=/dev/mmcblk1p2 rootwait rw'
saveenv
run mainlineboot

On any other board, assuming a bootloader has already been installed, it’s going to be very similar!

See my Yocto – Testing Mainline Kernel and Bootloader presentation for using Yocto to build a complete SD card image to boot your board.

The second system Linux 6.17 has been running on is my Geekom AMD A8 mini PC. A great performance / cost ratio for the desktop, compared to a laptop with similar CPUs.

Here are my notes for building Linux 6.17 on my Ubuntu PC:

• Get the Linux 6.17 sources
• In the Linux source directory, copy the configuration from your running kernel:
  cp /boot/config-`uname -r ` .config
• Upgrade the configuration to the new kernel:
  make olddefconfig
• Compile the kernel and build Debian packages:
  make -j 16 bindeb-pkg
• Install the newly built packages:
  cd ..
rm linux-image-*dbg*.deb
sudo dpkg -i *.deb
• Reboot

See my Build and run the mainline Linux kernel on your PC presentation and video for instructions that work on the most popular GNU/Linux distributions.