LS1028a bring-up debug suggestion

[pb3]

Hello, in the upcoming weeks we'll be bringing-up our device based on LS1028A. At first it will be tested by the electronic team, and one of the things they want to check is weather or not the CPU starts correctly. They will of course measure everything but having any kind of debug output on the serial console would be very helpful.

I'm wondering is there any option to force boot ROM code to write anything on the serial console? That would be the best option.

The second option I see is to use RCW from LS1028ARDB (which will be adjusted later for our needs, once I got the board in my hands) and add board support to TF-A  with just a minimal implementation (eg. DDR initialization returning -1) just to see any output.

What to you thing about this? Do you have any other, better ideas?

[yipingwang]

1. Please use CodeWarrior diagnose function to check whether CPU can work and read OCRAM successfully.

Please open CodeWarrior IDE, in "Target Connections", please right click "LS1028A_RDB" to duplicate it as LS1028A_RDB(1), double click it to open "Target Initialization File" panel, then modify USE_SAFE_RCW to "True" to use hard-coded RCW.

Then click "diagnose connection" icon to check the basic connection and reading OCRAM. It should fail at reading DDR memory, because LS1028ARDB DDR controller configuration parameters is not suitable for your target board. Please refer to the attached screenshot.

2. You could build ATF bl2 image and program it to the QSPI flash and check whether You could get ouput from the serial port.

Please install LSDK 21.08 in a Ubuntu 20.04 host PC.

$ source setup.env
$ flex-builder -c rcw -m ls1028ardb
Please edit the following RCW configuration file according to your target board. components/firmware/rcw/ls1028ardb/R_SQPP_0x85bb/rcw_1500_gpu600.rcw
$ flex-builder -c rcw -m ls1028ardb
$ flex-builder -c atf -m ls1028ardb -b xspi

You will get atf bl2 image in build/firmware/atf/ls1028ardb/bl2_flexspi_nor.pbl, please program it at offset 0 of the fspi flash on your custom board.

Please refer to section "8.6 Board Recovery" in C:\Freescale\CW4NET_v2020.06\CW_ARMv8\ARMv8\Help\PDF\ARMv8_Targeting_Manual.pdf to program bl2_flexspi_nor.pbl to fspi  NOR flash.