topic Re: Synchronous Abort Exception when booting u-boot from eMMC in Layerscape

Synchronous Abort Exception when booting u-boot from eMMC

juddwang — Wed, 04 Jan 2017 14:00:11 GMT

Hi all,

We designed a board similar as LS1043ARDB. The main difference between our board and LS1043ARDB is that our board use 4 MT40A1G8 DDR4 chips while LS1043ARDB use 4 MT40A512M8 DDR4 chips. And on our board, there's no nand flash & nor flash mounted. We want to boot from eMMC (similar as SD card on LS1043RDB).

We built a u-boot-sdcard image on SDK 2.0. This image booted up successfully on LS1043ARDB, but it failed on our board, error print is as following:

U-Boot SPL 2016.012.0+ga9b437f (Jan 04 2017 - 20:45:24)

Initializing DDR....
starting at step 1 (STEP_GET_SPD)
Filling dimm parameters from board specific file
Computing lowest common DIMM parameters for memctl=0
lowest_common_spd_caslat is 0xb
Warning: not all DIMMs ECC capable, cant enable ECC
tCKmin_ps = 938
trcd_ps = 13500
trp_ps = 13500
tras_ps = 33000
trfc1_ps = 260000
trfc2_ps = 160000
trfc4_ps = 110000
trrds_ps = 3700
trrdl_ps = 5300
tccdl_ps = 5355
twr_ps = 15000
trc_ps = 46500
Reloading memory controller configuration options for memctl=0
mclk_ps = 1250 ps
Found timing match: n_ranks 1, data rate 1666, rank_gb 0
0 of 1 controllers are interleaving.
Checking interleaving options completed
dbw_cap_adj[0]=0
ctrl 0 dimm 0 base 0x0
ctrl 0 total 0x80000000
Total mem by __step_assign_addresses is 0x80000000
Total mem 2147483648 assigned
Programming controller 0
total 2 GB
Need to wait up to 132 * 10ms
total_memory by __fsl_ddr_sdram = 2147483648
>>spl:board_init_r()
using memory 0x820a0000-0x821a0000 for malloc()
spl_init()
Trying to boot from MMC
After announce_boot_device, calling spl_load_image...
Calling spl_mmc_load_image
spl: spl_mmc_load_image, calling spl_mmc_find_device
"Synchronous Abort" handler, esr 0x96000000
ELR: 1000768c
LR: 100026fc
x0 : 0000000000000000 x1 : 0000000080102d78
x2 : ff000000ff001014 x3 : 0000000000000001
x4 : 000000001001d630 x5 : ffffff80ffffffc8
x6 : 0000000000000000 x7 : 000000000000000f
x8 : 0000000000000000 x9 : 0000000000000080
x10: 0000000000000003 x11: 0000000000000000
x12: 0000000000000000 x13: 0000000000000000
x14: 00000000100181e8 x15: 0000000000000001
x16: 0000000000000000 x17: 0000000000000000
x18: 000000001001ddf0 x19: 0000000000000000
x20: 0000000000000000 x21: 000000001001b000
x22: 00000000deadbeef x23: 0000000000000001
x24: 0000000000000000 x25: 0000000010014000
x26: 000000001001bd78 x27: 0000000000000001
x28: 0000000000000000 x29: 000000001001d940

We have tested the DDR function under CodeWarrior, it seems to be OK.

Any suggestion will be appreciated.

Re: Synchronous Abort Exception when booting u-boot from eMMC

cswarth — Wed, 04 Jan 2017 22:49:18 GMT

It looks like your SPL is not finding a valid u-boot image for the second part of the boot. Are you sure you are using an image that combines RXW+PBL+SPL+uboot?

I just solved a very similar "Synchronous Abort" at about the same location yesterday - almost certainly not caused by the same problem, though. In my case when I dumped the uboot image (od -tx1 u-boot-with-spl-pbl.bin), I noticed some suspicious gaps in the image when compared to a working image on the reference board. In my case the problem was caused by a modification I had made to the `mkimage` tool; once I back out that change I was back in business.

Re: Synchronous Abort Exception when booting u-boot from eMMC

juddwang — Thu, 05 Jan 2017 02:27:36 GMT

Hi chris,

Thanks for your reply. We are using the same u-boot-sdcard.bin image on our board and LS1043ARDB. And we are sure this image contains RCW+PBL+SPL_Uboot. So the root cause of our problem maybe not the same as yours.

Is there any difference between eMMC (used on our board) and SD card (used on LS1043ARDB)?

Re: Synchronous Abort Exception when booting u-boot from eMMC

cswarth — Thu, 05 Jan 2017 17:47:30 GMT

Sorry, I haven't enough experience to answer your question re: difference between eMMC and sdcard. Someplace I ran across the documentation of why the RCW on the sdcard has to start at offset 0x1000. There is also a memory map for QSPI that lays out exactly where RCW, U-BOOT, FMAN microcode needs to go. I haven't seen a similar map for eMMC.

Re: Synchronous Abort Exception when booting u-boot from eMMC

juddwang — Fri, 06 Jan 2017 01:41:46 GMT

Hi chris,

We have solved the problem, it's caused by DDR. The default DDR parameters of LS1043ARDB doesn't fit for our board.

Thank you all the same.

Re: Synchronous Abort Exception when booting u-boot from eMMC

tracysmith — Thu, 30 Mar 2017 03:50:59 GMT

Hi Judd, please provide the parameters you used for the MT40A512M8 and the files you touched/updated? Other customer's are seeing similar issues with the part and this would help customers in general since this is a common part.

Re: Synchronous Abort Exception when booting u-boot from eMMC

juddwang — Sat, 12 Aug 2017 07:16:19 GMT

Hi Tracy, sorry for late reply. We get the parameters from Codewarrior default settings for LS1043ARDB. And the main changing is to downgrade DDR data rate from 1600 to 1300.