Running and profiling Arm NN on the HiKey 960

Build an Ubuntu filesystem

Before doing any board flashing, you need an Ubuntu root filesystem. The root filesystem for a Linux distribution is large and not easy to distribute as a binary file, but it can be created from scratch. This walk-through builds the Linux distribution from scratch using the build.sh script in the build-ubuntu/ directory.

To build the root filesystem, change directory to the build-ubuntu/ directory and run the build.sh script. This script builds the filesystem and adds some extra artifacts that need to be placed into the filesystem. For customization, study the files build.sh and config-fs.sh.

The script will ask for the sudo password on the host machine one or two times, so enter the password when needed. To build the file system move to the build directory and run the build script:

$ cd build-ubuntu/
$ ./build.sh
$ cd ..

It will take some time to download the packages for the Armv8-A version of Ubuntu. If the download goes well, the result is the output file ubuntu/system.simg This file represents the root filesystem that can be flashed to the HiKey 960 system partition. This file will be used in a later step.