4.13.3.24. NXP i.MX8MP-EVK board

The board comes with:

  • 6GiB of LPDDR4 RAM

  • 32GiB eMMC

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

4.13.3.24.1. Downloading DDR PHY firmware

As a part of DDR intialization routine NXP i.MX8MP 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-8.7.bin
chmod +x firmware-imx-8.7.bin
./firmware-imx-8.7.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-8.7/firmware/ddr/synopsys/${f} \
            firmware/${f}; \
done

4.13.3.24.2. Get and Build the Trusted Firmware A

Get TF-A from https://git.trustedfirmware.org/TF-A/trusted-firmware-a.git/ and checkout version v2.7:

make PLAT=imx8mp bl31
cp build/imx8mp/release/bl31.bin ${barebox_srctree}/firmware/imx8mp-bl31.bin

Warning

It is important to use a version >= v2.7 else your system might not boot.

4.13.3.24.3. Build Barebox

i.MX8MP-EVK support is contained in the imx_v8_defconfig to build it use:

make imx_v8_defconfig
make

4.13.3.24.4. Boot Configuration

The NXP i.MX8MP-EVK board has four switches responsible for configuring bootsource/boot mode. The settings for the different boot sources are printed on the board.

4.13.3.25. Installing barebox

When the EVK is strapped to boot from eMMC, the i.MX8M bootrom will consult the eMMC ext_csd register to determine whether to boot from the active eMMC boot partition or from the user area.

The same barebox image written to the start of the SD-Card can be written to the start of the eMMC user area. Power-fail-safe installation to the eMMC boot partition requires special handling:

  • The barebox image must be written to the inactive boot partition, then afterwards, the newly written boot partition is activated (This is controlled by the barebox mmcX.boot variable).

  • The barebox image includes a 32KiB preamble that allows the image to be directly writable to the start of the SD-Card or eMMC user area. Unlike older i.MX8M, the i.MX8MP BootROM expects the bootloader to not start at an offset when booting from eMMC boot partitions, thus the first 32KiB must be stripped.

The following steps are required to write the image to the QSPI NOR flash:

  • Strip the 32KiB preamble, like it is done for the eMMC boot partition case (see above).

  • The QSPI NOR partition barebox must be erased before the stripped image is written. The erase size depends on the stripped image size but always start at offset 0.

  • Write the stripped barebox image to the QSPI NOR partition barebox at offset 0.

The barebox_update command takes care of this and need just be supplied a barebox image as argument.