4.12.3.15. NXP i.MX8MM EVK Evaluation Board

Board comes with:

  • 2GiB of LPDDR4 RAM
  • 16GiB eMMC

Not including booting via serial, the device can boot from either SD or eMMC.

4.12.3.15.1. Downloading DDR PHY Firmware

As a part of DDR intialization routine NXP i.MX8MM EVK requires and uses several binary firmware blobs that are distributed under a separate EULA and cannot be included in Barebox. In order to obtain them do the following:

wget https://www.nxp.com/lgfiles/NMG/MAD/YOCTO/firmware-imx-8.0.bin
chmod +x firmware-imx-8.0.bin
./firmware-imx-8.0.bin

Executing that file should produce a EULA acceptance dialog as well as result in the following files:

  • lpddr4_pmu_train_1d_dmem.bin
  • lpddr4_pmu_train_1d_imem.bin
  • lpddr4_pmu_train_2d_dmem.bin
  • lpddr4_pmu_train_2d_imem.bin

As a last step of this process those files need to be placed in “firmware/”:

for f in lpddr4_pmu_train_1d_dmem.bin  \
         lpddr4_pmu_train_1d_imem.bin  \
         lpddr4_pmu_train_2d_dmem.bin  \
         lpddr4_pmu_train_2d_imem.bin; \
do \
         cp firmware-imx-8.0/firmware/ddr/synopsys/${f} \
            firmware/${f}; \
done

4.12.3.16. DDR Configuration Code

The following two files:

  • arch/arm/boards/nxp-imx8mq-evk/ddr_init.c
  • arch/arm/boards/nxp-imx8mq-evk/ddrphy_train.c

were obtained by running i.MX 8M DDR Tool that can be found here:

https://community.nxp.com/docs/DOC-340179

Only minimal amount of necessary changes were made to those files. All of the “impedance matching” code is located in “ddr.h”.

4.12.3.17. Build barebox

make imx_v8_defconfig make

4.12.3.18. Start barebox

The resulting image file is images/barebox-nxp-imx8mm-evk.img. Configure the board for serial download mode as printed on the PCB. You can start barebox with the imx-usb-loader tool that comes with barebox like this:

./scripts/imx/imx-usb-loader images/barebox-nxp-imx8mm-evk.img