Introduction to EBF

Embedded Board Farm (EBF): EBF is a tool for Embedded Hardware and/or Software Engineering teams for sharing hardware devices during a product development, maintenance or support cycle.

Basic Architecture

The main components of EBF are a centrally located EBF SERVER with the necessary software that forms the core of EBF connected to various Zombies that are placed at various locations around the corporation, as long as the Zombie has network connectivity to the EBF Server.

A EBF SERVER supports multiple Zombies and each Zombie can support upto four independent Devices (under development/test).

EBF SERVER: EBF Server presents a web interface to corporate users for connecting to the remote device of their choice, presenting a device console locally on the users machine giving them full access and an experience as if the device is right next to them.

Zombie: This is a LYNX supplied hardware. It is placed in remote locations, and comes to life when addressed by the EBF Server. Zombie, normally will execute commands from the EBF Server.

-Each Zombie can support four devices(DUT) that can be allocated to users for a particular duration of use.

IOCX - IO Controller and Expander is a hardware supplied by LYNX. It connects DUT to Zombie for providing SDMUX, Hotplug Ethernet and USB, user controlled GPIO pins and I2C bus.

Device (DUT): It is any physical hardware board, a device or system that a user needs to work on or test.

Device Boot: The following boot methods are supported:

  • Netboot: This feature, when enabled, allows a device to boot itself from an image stored at a network location. The kernel,rfs and dtb files are files are downloaded to Zombie’s DUT folder by the user and DUT will boot using NFS mount. The kernel and DTB files are loaded using tftp and rfs is loaded using NFS mount.

    Please Note: For network boot, the root file system(rfs) must be on the network which is accessible from the device.

  • SD Card: To boot a board remotely through an SD Card to test new images without human intervention, LYNX has developed an IO Controller and Expander (IOCX) with SDMUX capability.It allows the user to switch the SD Card between Zombie and device through a toggle button available for SDMux. This allows the operation of uploading the images from the user to Zombie when sd card is connected to Zombie side through SDMux.

  • eMMC boot: Many devices support on board NAND and MMC interface.Either interface can be used for booting a system. NAND boot is raw boot, as it reads raw data and manipulate it. MMC boot is FAT boot, as it reads file from mmc sector and manipulated it. eMMC boot can be FAT boot or raw boot.