Parallella Community

We recently received four gen 1 parallella boards with pre-installed micro-sd memory cards. The boards however do not seem to boot from these cards. We have tried attaching a HDMI monitor via a uHDMI to HDMI converter, no output was detected on the screen. No IP address connected to the parallella board was found. This leads us to believe that the board will not boot from these cards, the network functionality is not up, and/or the HDMI driver is not functioning, not loaded, or not included in this setup. The SD to micro-SD adapter reads: p16z20g1-ubuntu14.01-14.03.06.img.

We are experimenting with one of the cards to see if our own install will work by use of the instructions on the parallella site.

Any information on this issue would be welcomed.

I guess you already know, but just in case I'd like to mention that the best way to debug those issues is with the serial port which was still enabled in the 14.03.06 version of the system. In more recent versions it's disabled for now precisely because removing the serial port support gives more reliable booting.

Related threads, in case you didn't see them yet:



About the serial cable:


A quick test you can do is to push the reset button after you turn on the board and it fails to boot. I'm still using the 14.03.06 image, the headless (no HDMI) version, and when it doesn't boot at first try that always gets it running.

Ah, and if the OS image is for the HDMI version but somehow the bitfile for the FPGA (parallella.bit.bin) is the headless one, the system will stop when booting while waiting in vain for the HDMI device to appear. That's unlikely to be your case, but you have to watch out if you make your own SD card image.

Solved, added the kernel files to the BOOT partition.