Beagle bone support of PoE and PXE

No, it does not supoprt PoE.

Regards,

Paul

Thanks.

Does it support PXE (preboot execution envirionment) over Ethernet?

E.g does the beagle bone support tftpboot or dhcp based boot?

AM335x can support Ethernet based boot isn't it? No info on data sheet !

Please clarify.

Thanks & Best Regards

Feroz 

Yes, the ROM code in the AM335x supports tftpboot over Ethernet on port 1.

However, I'm not sure if the Beaglebone supports this boot mode.

I realize the board has resistors that allows the SYSBOOT pins to be configured to select different boot modes, but you need to verify there are no hardware conflicts for the selected boot mode.  For most boot configurations the ROM code will try to sequence through four possible boot options until it finds a valid reply to its boot request. Since the AM335x has many pin multiplexing options it is possible the ROM code may configure the AM335x device such that it conflicts with other devices on the board.

Therefore, you need to be very careful changing the configuration of the SYSBOOT pins.

I recommend you read the TRM for information related to configuring the various boot mode options and carefully study the Beaglebone schematic to determine if it has devices connected to AM335x pins that conflict with the selected boot modes.

Regards,

Paul

Hello. I know I am replying to a relatively old thread... I hope I will get an anwser.

What TRM are you referring to? In the Beaglebone SRM there's no information about boot modes, and I can't find another one.

I would like to implement PXE boot option on it.

The TRM referenced above is the Technical Reference Manual for AM335x device. 

http://www.ti.com/general/docs/lit/getliterature.tsp?literatureNumber=spruh73f&fileType=pdf

Regards,
Paul

I have confirmed the AM335x ROM code does not support PXE boot.  It only supports TFTP boot.

Regards,
Paul

Thanks Paul,

If my customer indeed wnats to use PXE boot, what are the options. 

Also is it no enough to be able to support DHCP and TFTP for getting / configuring PXE? As both can be supported by the AM335x, can we somehow get this running?

Please let us know.

Thanks

Feroz 

PXE is intel x86 only.

But PXE requires all of the same services as the beagle bone requires to do a network based boot.

You will need the uboot boot loader installed on your beagle bone.  This can be on a small SD card.

You will have to configure the DHCP server to hand the correct options to the device being booted.

The current ISC DHCP server allows the directive "allow bootp" to take care of most extra bootp stuff.

example host section for "The  Internet  Systems  Consortium  DHCP Server" (most common linux dhcp server)

host bbone1 {
hardware ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:01; #beagle bone mac address
fixed-address 10.0.0.25; #beable bone ip address

filename "beagle-kernel"; #kernel image

server-name "tftpserver";

 }

The kernel and initrd images will need to be made available via a TFTP server this does not need to be the same server as the DHCP server. 

Your customer if they are running unix/linux based DHCP/TFTP servers will have no trouble booting a beagle bone if you can get a boot loader such as uboot working on the beagle bone.  You will also have to get over the hurdle of a rootless system if you do not put some local storage on the system.  Do a google search for "nfs root" or "rootless xserver".

-Avery