Update of the linux kernel via network

The linux kernel can be updated while the system is still operational. For this the kernel image is copied to the target system using SCP (Linux scp-command or WinSCP for Windows), for example to “/tmp/uImage”. Afterwards the following command has to be executed on the target as user root:

dd if=/tmp/uImage of=/dev/mmcblk0p2 ibs=512 seek=256 conv=sync,notrunc

The target system can be accessed via the serial interface (console) or SSH (Linux ssh-command or Putty for Linux and Windows).

Using a linux workstation this can be done in just one step (supposing the IP addresse of the targets is 172.16.135.170, the kernel image uImage is located in the current directory):

ssh root@172.16.135.170 dd of=/dev/mmcblk0p2 ibs=512 seek=256 conv=sync,notrunc <uImage

At the next restart the system will boot the new kernel.