Updates Already⌗

I can’t decide if it’s an overwhelming schedule, procrastination, or just being too busy for my own good. But either way, it’s been a hot minute since Turing Pi2 Setup and I pretty quickly regretted putting 22.04 on the nodes rather than waiting for 24.04.

And of course, initial attempts showed that it required a wee bit more work than I found the energy to document and follow through on since I was using external NVMe drives.

Either way, at the end of the year, we’re finally going to get around to upgrading to 24.04!

The official Turing Pi images still lack 24.04 and only have 22.04: TPI Flashing Docs However, they link to Joshua Riek’s GitHub Repository: Joshua Riek Which also links to this page Which is where I pulled the 24.04 Server Image. I uploaded it to the mmc for each board, which then required telling it to boot that instead of the NVMe.

This was done with the web interface and selecting the node then doing the upload process. One of these days I’ll get around to doing this via CLI rather than the web UI.

TPI and TTY⌗

Update 1-9-2025:

While scrolling through some info on the TPI Discord, I found the following information. So use this for the next section to help identify what your TTY ports are:

TPi2.4 Node 1: /dev/ttyS2 Node 2: /dev/ttyS1 Node 3: /dev/ttyS4 Node 4: /dev/ttyS5 TPi2.5 Node 1: /dev/ttyS1 Node 2: /dev/ttyS2 Node 3: /dev/ttyS3 Node 4: /dev/ttyS4

Install on Nodes⌗

With the new base image upladed to the eMMC of both nodes, it was time to start that upgrade!

[Note:] Node 1 was /dev/ttyS2 not 1. I confirmed this by powering through the nodes and confirming when picocom could talk to the appropriate node. It’s also worth mentioning, picocom can have some weird artifacting or omit characters at times. A quick trawl through the Official Discord I found that this is a known problem. It’s not you, it’s the computer…

Johnny Five from the Movie “Short Circuit”

tpi power --node 1 off && tpi power --node 1 on && picocom /dev/ttyS2 -b 115200

printenv boot_targets

setenv boot_targets mmc0 mmc1 nvme scsi usb pxe dhcp spi

printenv boot_targets

boot

when prompted, select the option you wish to boot to.

=> boot
** Booting bootflow 'mmc@fe2e0000.bootdev.part_2' with extlinux
U-Boot menu
1:      Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS 6.1.0-1025-rockchip
2:      Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS 6.1.0-1025-rockchip (rescue target)
Enter choice: 1:        Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS 6.1.0-1025-rockchip

Note that Node 2 in my case is /dev/ttyS1, not 3. So that means my initial command was:

tpi power --node 2 off && tpi power --node 2 on && picocom /dev/ttyS1 -b 115200

[Note:] If you find yourself in picocom and are unsure how to get it to release but don’t just want to kill the session, ctl + a, q or hold control, then press a and then q without releasing control.

Ubuntu Setup⌗

In both cases, after first boot I was again prompted to change the default ubuntu username. (it was ubuntu/ubuntu for credentials again.)

Once it’s booted and you’ve done the necessary first boot same process as initial setup:

lsblk
sudo ubuntu-rockchip-install /dev/nvme0n1
y

Make sure you select the media you wish to use as your boot option.

I then modified the hosts file from:

ubuntu

to a more distinguishable hostname of tpi-node1 and tpi-node2 respectively.

The rest of setup was handled by some Ansible playbooks for basic setup. Maybe now I’ll get around to getting all the monitoring setup and documented.

References⌗