Porting Android to Beagle Board
Recently I got a Beagle Board rev C2. It’s a pretty nice hardware piece:
embinux has done a pretty good job of porting android to beagle board, and made it open source, here’s the link for the guide to port android.
Using Ubuntu, first compile the kernel, it’s pretty easy. You will need to install git and git-core if you haven’t used git before.
Then clone the git for android, and then compile. The source for android comes down to about 2.7GB. So prepare for a length download. Also note, you need at least 1GB~1.5GB of RAM to actually compile android. The JVM during compilation will eat up a lot of the RAM. If you don’t have sufficient RAM, the compilation will stuck at a random point during the process and never finish. I’ve encountered this problem on 2 different machines and finally switched to a 4GB MacBook 467 to finished the compilation.
Then apply the patches stated in the above porting guide.
Make a bootable SD card following instruction here
Partition 1 is for the uImage and boot loader; partition 2 is for the actual android file system.
Boot up the beagle board w/o inserting the SD card, then at prompt (using minicom/kermit under ubuntu or Tera Term/Hyper Terminal under windows), type in:
mmcinit // init mmc
fatload mmc 0 0×80300000 uImage // load uImage into memory address of 0×80300000
set boot arguments:
setenv bootargs console=ttyS2,115200n8 root=/dev/nfs rw nfsroot=192.168.1.5:/data/target ip=192.168.1.1::255.255.255.0 nolock,rsize=1024,wsize=1024 rootdelay=2
video=omapfb:mode:1280×720@50 init=/init
bootm 0×80300000 // boot up the loaded uImage
If everything goes well, u should see Android booting up ^_^
