Preparing the SD Card - 2021.2 English

PetaLinux Tools Documentation: Reference Guide

Document ID
UG1144
Release Date
2021-10-27
Version
2021.2 English

Steps to prepare the SD card for the PetaLinux SD card ext file system boot as are follows:

For more information on how to format and partition the SD card, see Partitioning and Formatting an SD Card.

The SD card is formatted with two partitions using a partition editor such as gparted. The first partition should be at least 500 MB in size and formatted as a FAT32 file system. Ensure that there is 4 MB of free space preceding the partition. The first partition contains the boot loader, device tree, and kernel images. The second partition should be formatted as an ext4 files system and can take up the remaining space on the SD card. This partition stores the system root file system.

  1. Label the first partition as BOOT.
  2. Label the second partition as RootFS.
  3. Copy the files as follows:
    • FAT partition:BOOT.BIN, boot.scr, Image, and ramdisk.cpio.gz.u-boot (if switch_root is enabled)
    • EXT partition: Extract rootfs.tar.gz/rootfs.cpio.gz

For optimal performance ensure that the SD card partitions are 4 MB aligned.