Arch Linux ARM on the BananaPi

Since some time the Banana Pi is supported in the Linux kernel and U-Boot.

Arch Linux ARM does not support the board yet, but it is possible to get it working with an upstream U-Boot.

SD card Image

First we to create an SD card image, since the BananaPi is also ARMv7 we can use the Cubieboard 2 installation instructions

Follow the steps until step 6, "Install the U-Boot bootloader". We will have to compile our own u-boot for the board.

U-Boot

The next step is creating a u-boot image. Make sure you have the following packages installed on Arch Linux.

• git
• arm-none-eabi-gcc # ARM cross compiler

Now follow the following steps.

git clone git://git.denx.de/u-boot.gitcd u-bootmake -j4 ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-none-eabi- Bananapi_defconfig make -j4 ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-none-eabi-

If everything went fine you should have an U-Boot image: u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin. Now dd the image to your sdcard, where /dev/sdX is your sdcard.

sudo dd if=u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin of=/dev/sdX bs=1024 seek=8

Flush buffers

sync

Now mount the sdcard again.

mount /dev/sdX1 mntwget http://pkgbuild.com/~jelle/bananapi/boot.scr -O mnt/boot/boot.scrumount /dev/sdX1sync

Booting & Serial

Instructions on getting serial working are on the sunxi wiki.