3.5. Root Filesystem

The Processor SDK Linux package provides root filesystem (rootfs) images that contain programs, scripts, and Linux user-space components that abstract various hardware accelerators available in the SoC.

There are different filesystem images provided in the installed SDK under folder filesystem/.

tisdk-base-image

This is the barebone rootfs images, intended to be a starting point for users to add packages and create a custom rootfs that suits their project needs.

tisdk-bootstrap-image

This image is a complete minimal system containing a rootfs and an initrd with platform test utilities that can be used for new platform bring-up activities. Typically one would use the bootstrap inital RAM disk (initrd) till the storage media access is debugged, following which one would switch over to using the storage media of choice with the same content. This image has systemd replaced with sysvinit.

tisdk-default-image

This is the complete rootfs image, that contains standard Linux commands and features. This image also contains the TI component libraries, binaries and out-of-box examples.

tisdk-docker-rootfs-image

This is similar to tisdk-base-image, but has more packages included, such as Docker, WiFi/Bluetooth, Perl, and Pulseaudio, etc. It is intended to be used for docker container support.

tisdk-thinlinux-image

This is a minimal system image enabled with containers to provide an environment to start the next level of complex systems up. Graphics is enabled by default as well on the platforms which support graphics.

tisdk-tiny-image

This is a very small rootfs image, only a few MegaBytes, intended to be used as initramfs for the use cases such as flashing system image. It uses SysVinit rather than systemd as in other rootfs images, and it does not include kernel files such as kernel image, dtb, or kernel modules.

Two file formats are provided in the SDK for each of the rootfs image, *.tar.xz and *.wic.xz.

*.tar.xz

This is the tarball of the rootfs. It can be used to update the rootfs partition of a bootable SD Card, or setup the rootfs for NFS boot.

*.wic.xz

This is the raw bootable Linux image containing both bootloaders and rootfs. This image can be directly written to an SD Card to create a Linux bootable SD Card. Refer to Create a Linux Bootable SD Card for details of the SD Card writing process.