Raspberry Pi (U-Boot)¶

This guide covers setting up Raspberry Pi devices (RPi3, RPi4, RPi5) that use U-Boot as their bootloader in LAVA.

LAVA has extensive support for devices that use U-Boot as their bootloader, allowing you to deploy kernel, ramdisk, device tree blob (DTB), and other files via tftp deploy action, and boot them using u-boot boot method.

Hardware setup¶

Before adding a Raspberry Pi to LAVA, you need to set up the required hardware. This includes configuring the serial console, network connectivity, power control, and preparing an SD card with U-Boot installed.

Serial console¶

Setup serial console.

For Raspberry Pi, connect the USB to serial adapter to the GPIO pins:

RPi GPIO Pin	Signal	USB-Serial Adapter
Pin 6	GND	GND
Pin 8	TXD	RXD
Pin 10	RXD	TXD

Network connectivity¶

The Raspberry Pi must be able to access the LAVA worker’s TFTP and NFS services in order to download boot files and mount the root filesystem over NFS. Therefore, the Raspberry Pi should be connected to the same network as the LAVA worker.

Power control¶

Setup power control.

SD Card¶

You need to prepare an SD Card with U-Boot configured to:

Display an interrupt prompt (e.g., Hit any key to stop autoboot)
Wait at least 5 seconds, so LAVA can match and interrupt the autoboot
Support TFTP boot commands

You can follow this guide to flash your SD Card.

Creating device type¶

Create the device type using one of the following names that match the existing device type templates:

Raspberry Pi Model	Device Type Name	Architecture
RPi 3 Model B (32-bit)	`bcm2837-rpi-3-b-32`	ARM32
RPi 3 Model B (64-bit)	`bcm2837-rpi-3-b`	ARM64
RPi 4 Model B	`bcm2711-rpi-4-b`	ARM64
RPi 5 Model B	`bcm2712-rpi-5-b`	ARM64

Creating device¶

Each Raspberry Pi device requires a device dictionary that specifies device-specific settings such as serial connection and power control commands. The device dictionary should extend the device type template and add the device-specific configurations.

Add the device using the following settings:
- Device Type: See device type name in the above table (e.g., bcm2711-rpi-4-b)
- Hostname: A unique name (e.g., rpi4-01)
Add the device configuration:

```jinja {% extends ".jinja2" %}

{% set connection_command = "telnet localhost " %}

{% set hard_reset_command = "" %} {% set power_off_command = "" %} {% set power_on_command = "" %} ```

Note

Replace all the placeholders marked with <> with their corresponding actual values.

Sample job definitions¶

Booting from NFS¶

```yaml job_name: u-boot nfs device_type: bcm2837-rpi-3-b-32

priority: medium visibility: public

timeouts: job: minutes: 30

actions: - deploy: to: tftp timeout: minutes: 15 dtb: url: http://example.com/nfs/bcm2837-rpi-3-b-plus.dtb kernel: url: http://example.com/nfs/zImage type: zimage modules: url: http://example.com/nfs/modules.tar.xz compression: xz ramdisk: url: http://example.com/nfs/initrd.cpio.gz compression: gz nfsrootfs: url: http://example.com/nfs/full.rootfs.tar.xz format: tar overlays: kselftest: url: http://example.com/nfs/kselftest.tar.xz compression: xz format: tar path: /opt/kselftest

boot: method: u-boot commands: nfs prompts:
- '/ #' timeout: minutes: 5
test: timeout: minutes: 5 definitions:
- from: inline repository: metadata: format: Lava-Test Test Definition 1.0 name: health checks run: steps:
  - lava-test-case kernel-info --shell uname -a
  - lava-test-case network-info --shell ip a name: health-checks path: inline/health-checks.yaml ```

Booting from ramdisk¶

```yaml device_type: bcm2837-rpi-3-b-32 job_name: u-boot boot ramdisk