I'm currently testing the performance of an i.MX RT1176 MCU on a TQMa117xL base board from TQ Systems. I'm conducting network speed tests with the lwIP lperf code.
With the release code, I've observed data rates on the 1 GB port of around 60-90 MBit/s, which is insufficient for my needs. I've tried the optimizations mentioned on the lwIP website, but they've had no effect or even decreased performance. However, when I turned on the "link application to RAM" option, the performance boosted to 340 MBit/s when using debug code with a Segger J-Link Lite probe.
Now, I'd like to test the release code speed when booting from the on-board SPI flash. The "link application to RAM" option makes it impossible to flash the .axf file with the Secure Provisioning tool. An error message appears, stating that the start address of the application must be greater or equal to 0x20002000, because the bootable image contains an Image Vector Table, Boot Data, and DCD at 0x20001000-0x20001FFF.
I understand that the program doesn't know how to copy the code into SRAM without additional code when booting from the SPI flash. Does this mean that the "link application to RAM" option is only useful when used with a debugger probe? Is there an application note or example available for this MCU that explains how to copy the code from flash to SRAM and start it from there for production purposes?
I've read a lot of documentation and posts, but I still can't figure out the next steps. I'm using MCUXpresso v11.7.0 [Build 9198] and the 2.13.0 SDK for MIMXRT1176.
