I’m using the ACME Systems Arietta G25 256MB model for a project I’m working on, but their website only provides a bootstrap for the 128MB version. Let’s build a bootstrap for the 256MB version.

The instructions on their website are for Ubuntu 13.10, but I run Debian so these instructions are for Debian 7.

As per their instructions you need to enable the emdebian repository:

user@debian7:~$ sudo -i
root@debian7:~# apt-get install emdebian-archive-keyring
root@debian7:~# echo "deb http://www.emdebian.org/debian/ squeeze main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/emdebian.list
root@debian7:~# echo "deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/emdebian.list

Even though I’m running Wheezy the repositories in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/emdebian.list are for squeeze. This is necessary due to unavailable packages on Wheezy which are present in squeeze. Please see the Emdebian page for an explanation.

user@debian7:~$ sudo apt-get install libc6-armel-cross libc6-dev-armel-cross binutils-arm-linux-gnueabi u-boot-tools libncurses5-dev gcc-4.4-arm-linux-gnueabi cpp-4.4-arm-linux-gnueabi g++-4.4-arm-linux-gnueabi

Clone the bootloader from ACME Systems:

user@debian7:~$ git clone git://github.com/linux4sam/at91bootstrap.git
user@debian7:~$ cd at91bootstrap
user@debian7:~/at91bootstrap$: git checkout origin/at91bootstrap-3.x -b at91bootstrap-3.x
user@debian7:~/at91bootstrap$: wget http://www.acmesystems.it/www/compile_at91bootstrap/acme.patch -O acme.patch
user@debian7:~/at91bootstrap$: patch -p1 < acme.patch
user@debian7:~/at91bootstrap$: make mrproper
user@debian7:~/at91bootstrap$: make acme_ariettasd_linux_zimage_dt_defconfig
user@debian7:~/at91bootstrap$: wget https://watchmysys.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/256mb.patch_.txt -O 256mb.patch
user@debian7:~/at91bootstrap$: patch -p1 < 256mb.patch
user@debian7:~/at91bootstrap$: make CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabi-

Now copy the generated zimage to the boot partition on the sdcard (/dev/sdX1, mounted here at /tmp/arietta/boot):

user@debian7:~/at91bootstrap$: sudo cp binaries/acme_arietta-sdcardboot-linux-zimage-dt-3.6.2.bin /tmp/arietta/boot/boot.bin

Boot the Arietta G25. You should have 256MB of RAM available now.

The 256mb.patch does two things to the at91bootstrap:
1) Changes the size of the memory initialized from 128MB (0x8000000) to 256MB (0x10000000)
2) Changes the Kernel command line to mem=256M so the additional memory is utilized by the Linux kernel

If you aren’t interested in setting up a build environment, you can find the 256MB boot.bin: here. WordPress does not allow .bin files, so you will need to rename boot.bin_.zip to “boot.bin” before copying it to the sdcard boot partition.

Additionally if you want to automate building the bootstrap with Jenkins, here is a shell script you can put into a new Jenkins project to automatically build the zimage. You will need to manually install the toolchain (described above).