My understanding is that the Linux reboot command will cause a watchdog timeout to create the reset condition. Is there a Linux command to perform a core soft reset?
Section 4.4.3 (Core soft reset) of the LS1021A reference manual explains steps for soft reset. Since I am using Linux, do I need to manually manipulate registers and create ISRs if I were to write a tool for soft reset?
If you look at arch/arm/mach-imx/platsmp.c you can see the code used to boot the secondary procesor in SMP configuration.
If you just want to reset this core you can use the linux CPU hotplug support to bring the secondary core down and up again.
I can turn off cpu1 by writing 0 to /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu1/online
echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu1/online
LS1021A does not allow shutting down cpu0 this way.
I am looking for a way to perform core soft reset instead of turning off/on cpu cores.
Then probably the best option is to add the soft reset to the kernel either in a driver or into a custom syscall and call this code from userspace using a compatible method: syscall calling from C code or driver manipulation using sysfs or ioctl for example.