Using the bootblob utility

bootblob is a shell script provided to facilitate the ease-of-use of prebuilt binaries. It should be run in the product/ directory of the release package. Bootblob can


 * create a bootblob image
 * read, save or write the kernel commandline from or to an existing bootblob image
 * display or set the MAC address in an IBL binary file (only needed for dsk6455)
 * Create kernels and filesystems from existing templates (see bootblob-templates/) with adjusted kernel commandlines. Note that the user can define a new template based on requirements. Templates should be added to the bootblob-templates/ directory.

Type ./bootblob help for syntax information.

make-filesystem utility
make-filesystem is a shell script that is used to create a fileystem from individual components. Example of components to a filesystem can be modules archives, syslink binaries archives etc.

make-filesystem is invoked by the bootblob utility when used with the option.

Type ./make-filesystem -h for syntax information.

Flat Binary images will be provided in the release.

A user might want to change the kernel command line. Thus the kernel command line is kept at a fixed offset of 0x1000 from the start of the DDR address. This allows us to poke the command line.

Since we have the ability to change the kernel command line, there is no need to rebuild a kernel with an updated command line.

An excellent way to figure out its capabilities is to execute the script as shown below. It has a very informative help section as shown below



The get-cmdline and set-cmdline options can be used as sown below



We can see from the above outputs that the bootblob script only works with a flat binary image and not on an ELF image.

One drawback of this procedure is that when we use a flat binary image to boot up an EVM, the cio driver will not work. As a result of which we will not see any kernel boot log.

In EVMs without a serial port, what options do we have? In other words how do we even telenet into the EVM?

As shown in the example above, we are changing the NFS server and also setting a static IP address. Since we are setting a static IP address, we can telnet into the EVM with the help of this static IP address.