Speaker
Description
In particle accelerator facilities, on-board flash memory is exposed to radiation that can cause bit corruption over time, making it preferable to load applications over the network rather than store them locally. This talk presents a method for flashless, network-based booting of MicroTCA Advanced Mezzanine Cards (AMCs) using U-Boot and standard network protocols. By loading the entire application stack - including the kernel, device tree, root filesystem, and FPGA bitstream - over NFS or TFTP, systems can achieve stateless operation and simplified fleet management.
The talk will outline key implementation details, including MicroTCA backplane Ethernet quirks, required U-Boot patches, and NFS server adjustments.
Finally, integration with MMC mailbox data can enable boards to request configuration-specific software automatically. This allows an entire fleet of AMCs to boot from a single, generic setup - streamlining maintenance and making system management more robust and scalable.
