Update with Net Boot

In some development or recovery scenarios, it may be preferable—or even necessary—to boot the DevKit over the network instead of using a removable device like an SD card. This is particularly useful in cases such as:

  • The user need to recover a board with a corrupted bootloader or filesystem and there’s no SD card available.

  • The user is bringing up a new board and want to avoid wear on internal storage devices.

In these situations, the user can use the --netboot option with the sima-cli bootimg command. This will download and extract the appropriate boot image for the target board, then serve it over a built-in TFTP server on the host machine.

Note

This feature is supported only on the headless image. Customers who wish to flash the device with the full image using this procedure should first update to the headless image, then use the sima-cli update command to upgrade to the full image.

Boot from network requires a change to the U-boot configuration. To access the U-Boot shell on the DevKit:

  1. Connect to the DevKit over serial. See Configure Serial Connection for setup instructions.

  2. Power on or reset the DevKit.

  3. When prompted with a countdown (e.g., “Hit any key to stop autoboot”), press any key to interrupt the boot sequence.

You will then enter the U-Boot shell where you can run boot configuration commands.