Building SCFW for i.MX8M Plus

[dubravkomoravsk]

Hello everyone,

We are bringing up a new board based on i.MX8M Plus. I've found the tech note AN13275.pdf with instructions about compiling all the software.

I'm stuck currently on SCFW. I've downloaded SCFW porting kit and the included documentation states that I should choose compilation target based on a die, not the part number. There are 3 dies: qm, qx and dxl.

Which of those 3 dies does the i.MX8M Plus have?

Am I following the correct procedure? I'm confused that SCFW porting kit doesn't say anything about particular CPUs, only about dies... yet I can't find any table listing all the CPU models and dies; there is nothing about that even in the iMX8MPlus datasheet.

[JosephAtNXP]

Hi,

Thank you for your interest in NXP Semiconductor products

There's something to correct, based on i.MX Porting Guide:

The System Controller is supported through a firmware also known as SCFW flashed into the boot image on
SoC in the i.MX 8 and i.MX 8X families. (Not 8M family)

and i.MX Linux Users Guide, comparing a 8MP die vs 8DXL die:

We can tell that MP option doesn't exist because it isn't needed.

Regards

[dubravkomoravsk]

Thank you, we were able to make progress. We can assemble flash.bin file and got latest uuu tool.

Our board still doesn't boot, but at the moment we suspect that's because of some hardware issue.

[JosephAtNXP]

Hi,

What is the log after serial downloading flash.bin?

Regards

[dubravkomoravsk]

That's the problem - we don't see anything on the serial port.

Our board is similar to i.MX8M Plus EVK. We have started by taking newest u-boot source code from (u-boot official web site) here: https://u-boot.readthedocs.io/en/v2021.04/board/freescale/imx8mp_evk.html

We have good DDR configuration - in NXP DDR Tool, our board passes all tests; meaning, PMIC works, CPU and DDR work, USB works, debug UART works.

When building u-boot, since we use UART 1 as opposed to UART 2 on EVK, we configured corresponding pins, clocks and registers. Also we replaced DDR parameters file with the one corresponding to our board. We use the same PMIC as EVK board, on the same I2C bus, so we left PMIC initialization unchanged. Everything compiles and links without issues.

When we try to download our flash.bin (using newest uuu tool), uuu recognizes the CPU, downloads something - it gets to 18% - and then reports a timeout and exits. Absolutely nothing comes out on UART.

We will be grateful for any suggestions what we should try next.

[JosephAtNXP]

Hi,

Could you try with ours? Here is the repo.

And as you are replicating to create the flash.bin, it'd interesting to see how do you do all that, please share the process.

Regards