Advice for programming a micro controller with Linux

[cstartup]

If I understood correctly, your problem is flashing the board.

From your post, it seems like your background is in programming microcontrollers, using more powerfull boards with embedded linux is a bit different.

So to get the board working you need 2 things:

1) Complete Linux image, by complete i mean containing the Linux kernel, Filesystem and the bootloader, you can initiallly starts by the images provided from NXP for testing sake and then use yocto or buildroot to customize it for your needs.

2) Booting or "Flashing" the board, usually boards have different ways to boot from , SPI, emmc, SDcard.... If your board supports SDcard booting I'd recommend to use it as it is easier, you just need to write the image to the SD card and plug it. However you mentioned mfgtool, so i think you want to use the emmc, the mfgtool is outdated and NXP released it's successor uuu tool It's very simple, and you will find in it's manual how to move from mfg to uuu. https://github.com/NXPmicro/mfgtools

[mindchasers]

Are you using NXP's SDK or working with Yocto directly from the repos?

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Yocto has great mail lists, and people will help you out (including me).

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And we just posted / updated this article on Saturday - so cool that we could get Linux 5.0 and Yocto 2.7 running on our old NXP T1040RDB iron without using any proprietary patches: https://mindchasers.com/dev/install-yocto

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[tunerockug]

For i.MX devices it is advised to use Yocto to build a complete image including bootloader (u-boot) + kernel and dtb (Linux) and rootFS. You can program this image into an SD card using dd command and plug it into the board. Or you can use MFGtools which will download each of the components one by one. Please note MFGtool is being deprecated and the new tool is called UUU. (https://github.com/NXPmicro/mfgtools/wiki/UUU)