Redundant boot from SD/eMMC on LS1043A

[dj2kenne]

I am having trouble finding a clear answer to this in the documentation.

Does the LS1043A prebootloader support redundant boot from SD or eMMC. i.e. can I have more than one copy of the RCW + bl2 on the device, and the PBL will fall back to the secondary copy if the first copy is corrupted.

My reading of section 29 of the RM suggests that the PBL will search starting at 0x1000 for the PBL preamble. This suggests that the preamble could be found anywhere after this point in the device. However, my reading also suggests that if this preamble is found, but any other issue occurs (e.g. CRC failure of the pre-boot initialization commands, corrupted bl2 image) that an error will be generated. Does the PBL continue searching after such an error, or does the system stall?

We would like to try to mitigate data corruption making our system unbootable.

Initial experiments suggest this might not be possible. I burned the RCW+bl2 image (bl2_sd.pbl) at 0x1200 instead of 0x1000 and the system does not boot. Is there perhaps something in the image (e.g. a load offset to fetch bl2) that would also need to be modified?

If this is not possible from SD/eMMC, is there any storage types on which this is possible?

[dj2kenne]

Thanks for the quick reply. Unfortunately this doesn't address my question which was about redundant boot on eMMC. Is it possible to have multiple copies of bl2, where the PBL will fall back to the second copy if the first one is corrupted? Or does the system assume that eMMC is sufficiently reliable that this is not required.

[Chavira]

Yes, the eMMC is enough and does not need a copy of the PBL.

[Chavira]

Thank you for contacting NXP support!

Q1) If the bootloader fails (U-boot) in any phase the system stops.

Q2)Yes is possible to boot from SD in LS1043A, please follow the links to know how to deploy the bl2_sd.pbl and fip.bin to use U-boot.

you can boot from QSPI, SD card, NOR FLASH, and NAND in LS1043ARDB.

Those links are how to deploy bl2_sd.pbl and fip.bin under the Linux host or U-boot directly on the target.

SD Deployment | QorIQ SDK v2.0-1703 Documentation | NXP Semiconductors

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