USB TestDrive - Panda

Belcarra supports a testing environment for testing Networking over USB protocols. This paper explains the Testdrive PandaBoard distribution (available here), how to install it and how to use it.

Introduction

For some time now Belcarra has made available a USB test package system for the Gumstix Overo Earth and related boards. This package is ultimately based on the Angstrom system.

The goal of Testdrive Panda is to extend the project to newer systems using the TI Pandaboard. The decision was made to use Ubuntu instead of Angstrom because it’s possible to put a complete development system on board the distribution -- so if you want to test with an additional tool -- just load it on the board either with the package manager or in the worst case build it from source, all on the board, no cross-compilation needed.

However, another goal of the effort was to make this mostly unnecessary. For example, the standard network performance tool iperf is not part of the Ubuntu distro that we used, but we added a source for iperf to the package manager’s source list.

In addition to this, we customized the distro to use a more recent Linux kernel  with a customized configuration streamlined for USB testing.

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