How to Compile BPI-M3 BSP from BPI github

Banana Pi SBCs design BPI-M3(A83T/R18)
1

BPI-M3 BSP Cross Compile teach

https://bananapi.gitbooks.io/bpi-m3/content/bpi-m3crosscompileteach.html

2

Do you really tell people to follow this ‘tutorial’? You picked up a blog post in chinese, simply tried to translate this to english, do NOT try out the instructions and let this become part of the official so called ‘documentation’. Really?

  1. you recommend installing “gcc-4.7-arm-linux-gnueabihf-base g+±4.7-arm-linux-gnueabihf gcc-arm-linux-gnueabihf gcc-arm-linux-gnueabi cpp-arm-linux-gnueabihf”. Why? Your BSP contains the necessary GCC versions already!
  2. then delete 1st partition of the SD card (why? partition table gets overwritten several times later)
  3. overwrite the whole card with zeros (why? this will also overwrite the partition table modified just before)
  4. then again overwriting the whole card with an OS image (overwrites the partition table again)
  5. then wiping out the partition table one more time with dd
  6. then sunxi_mbr.fex will be written to the card producing a dos disklabel
  7. then the user should start to add partitions manually by using fdisk and will be advised to use the card’s maximum capacity

The whole process is time consuming and redundant and most likely you end up with something that’s simply wrong. Since MPi M3 has a fast internal eMMC it’s not advisable to expand such an image to the maximum when being written on a PC to a SD card. Better burn the image to eMMC before and modify the partition table on the BPi M3 instead. The eMMC is multiple times faster than the fastest SD card available (due to limitations of the SD card interface) and also as any SATA disk connected to the ultra slow GL830 USB-to-SATA bridge.

Using eMMC to burn an image onto is therefore always the best choice but unfortunately not possible following the tutorial.

This describes the whole mess regarding software/support: The vendor doesn’t provide documentation. Users waste their time trying to figure out how things work. Thankfully they provide an installation log somewhere that might safe other users some time even if it’s not perfect. And now the unbelievable happens and the vendor that does not provide proper documentation simply does a copy&paste from the user’s installation log and uses this now as ‘official documentation’.

3

Hello, after few attempts and few tips found on Internet, I think it successfully compiled, but there are some changes I can’t figure out.

  1. There is no “download” directory in BPI-M3-bsp directory (this is renamed to output?)
  2. There is missing “boot.fex” file. Instead of file is link to non existing file. I couldn’t find it anywhere.

I also tried following this tutorial with same result: https://www.saltbaek.dk/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=bananapim3-bootstrapping

I hope we can solve this problem. :slight_smile:

1 Like