Parallella Community

Hello,

I've made a minimal Debian 7 + ARM toolchain + Epiphany SDK + COPRTHR SDR image available. For further details and a download link see the .

Note that this is not an official/supported distribution!

Cheers,

Andrew

Great!! Thanks!

Marvellous - Thanks for that, my board should be arriving sometime soon.

Hi,

I'm interested in running wheezy on my machines when I get them. Almost all my other machines are also running wheezy, so being able to run it on Parallella machines too would be very useful for things like running distcc or openmpi. The fact that I know they're all running (more or less) the same versions of software makes it very appealing.

My question is what you needed to do to the basic Debian install image to "parallellalize it" (to coin a phrase)? I know you say that this is unofficial/unsupported, but I'm guessing that there can't be too many "hacks" (if any) required to get all the Parallella-specific stuff working on any Linux distro: probably the kernel, maybe bootloader (u-boot?) and the userland stuff like SDK, and any daemons or link/loader utilities for managing the Ephiphany cores?

Basically, I'd prefer to have some vanilla version of Debian to work with (rather than, say, Ubuntu), but your warning makes me worry that stuff might break, suffer bit rot or just generally not be well supported as time goes on. If I knew what you had to change to get Debian to work, then I could use that info to fix things later on if they did go awry....

Thanks in advance
edit: I found the document, so I guess that answers my general questions about what I need to "parallellalize" a generic linux distro, but were there any specific steps/tweaks needed to get Debian wheezy in particular to work?

Thanks, Andrew.

That's exactly the kind of reply I was looking for. It should mean that upgrading won't cause any problems so long as I don't install a Debian kernel.

Following on from that, though (maybe this should be in a different forum?), how are all the Parallella-specific things (kernel, sdk, and so on) updated from within the official Ubuntu distro? Are they packaged up as .deb files or is it pretty much a manual upgrade (pull from github, rebuild)?

Thanks for the "support"

I've now got this working properly. After trying various combinations of kernels, bitstreams and device trees that I found in the forums, it appears that the best thing to do is follow steps 2 and 3 in the document. After that, my 7010 board booted fine with working USB and HDMI.
The only thing that doesn't work (right now) if you do that is the serial console---it stops working as soon as the kernel starts. I saw some posts relating to that, so I think it should be fairly trivial to turn it back on again.
So in the end, even though the image didn't work "out of the box", it is possible to fix it with the right kernel/FPGA files and this can be done from any machine without the need for the serial connection.
I'm happy now I hope these notes are of use for anyone else trying to get the image to work.