iMX6 sometimes fails to boot WinCE OS

[Jino_A]

Hello everyone,

We are using iMX6 SOM with WinCE (Windows Compact Embedded) 2013 OS and eboot (Ethernet Bootloader) as the bootloader. The bootloader is stored in a SPI flash. Our bootup process is that on start-up, the bootloader loads an OS image from a predefined location in eMMC and downloads it into RAM to boot up. But recently we're facing an issue where the bootloader fails sometimes to load the OS during boot i.e the bootloader gets stuck/crashes while reading an OS image that's stored in eMMC and therefore the OS doesn't boot up. The occurence of this issue is rare and once this issue happens, we've to wait for a couple of minutes to start again or else the bootloader will again get stuck as mentioned above. After waiting sometime and switching on the machine, the OS boots up normally.

This issue doesn't happen on each and every SOM. We suspected that the affected SOMs' bootloader must have been corrupted in some way and tried to take a dump of boot partition (SPI flash) with MFGTool using the dd command on a couple of SOMs with this issue. On analysing the dumps, we didn't find anything unusual in them.

Also we discovered that reflashing bootloader using MFGTool solves this issue(Not sure whether permanently or temporarily). Basically the MFGTool erases the boot partition first using flash_erase command (flash_erase /dev/mtd0 0 0) and then flashes bootloader image using dd command (dd if=$FILE of=/dev/mtd0 bs=512). After reflashing we haven't faced this issue yet. But we don’t support bootloader reflashing in field since it's a complicated procedure.

We don't have much/aren't aware of debugging facilities available for our platform. The memory dumps were the best we could do. We're perplexed because we're unsure whether it's hardware or a software issue. What makes it even more worse is that this issue doesn't have any pattern and is totally random(sometimes happens 2 in 5 times and sometimes 1 in 20 times or maybe none), so it's tough to pinpoint the root cause.

Has anyone else faced a similar issue? Any advice, suggestion or help will be much appreciated. Thanks.

[Bio_TICFSL]

Hello Jino,

Probably it is a defect board or PMIC is affected, however could you test a different bootloader version? and see if that happens.

Regards

[Jino_A]

Thank you for your response.

Whenever we've changed the bootloader(same or different) by reflashing it using MFGTool, this issue doesn't occur anymore and till now it's working fine, as also mentioned in my post. That's why we're curious on how this issue started happening in the first place and also how just reflashing the bootloader seems to fix it. Any suggestion for this particular scenario?

Also is there any way to identify if the board is defective or if PMIC is affected. It'll be much appreciated.

Thanks.

[Bio_TICFSL]

Hello,

I guess, if the PMIC does not provide the voltages it must be defected, but if its running then you have not worry about it.

Regards

[Jino_A]

Hi,

We don't support flashing of bootloader in the field. Is there any other insight that you can share with us regarding this issue?

Thanks.

[Bio_TICFSL]

No, from this issue.