New i.MX6SX & i.MX7D AMP debugging tool: imx-m4fwloader

[#1]

Introduction

i.MX6SoloX and i.MX7D SoC contain embedded Cortex-M4 core. In a common use-case, this core runs a firmware loaded by u-boot bootloader. If you however want to debug your application for the Cortex-M4 core, you may need to reload the firmware in the secondary core without restarting Linux running on the Cortex-A core. For this reason, a tool was created: imx-m4fwloader.

The project is released as open source under GPL-2.0 licence here: GitHub - NXPmicro/imx-m4fwloader: Tool for loading firmware to M4 core on i.MX6SX and 7D 

I hope this tool will help to bring up faster your application for i.MX6SoloX and i.MX7D SoC!

How to use this

• Either use the pre-built version
• Or use the environment provided to you by Yocto:
  • For example:
  • source /opt/poky/1.8/environment-setup-cortexa9hf-vfp-neon-poky-linux-gnueabi
  • $CC m4fwloader.c -o m4fwloader
  • You get m4fwloader binary...
• Then you need to build your M4 application and link it to some address. (e.g 0x00910000, try: https://github.com/EmbeddedRPC/erpc-imx-demos/tree/master/MCU/example_rpmsg)
• Load it using m4fwloader: ./m4fwloader myapp.bin 0x00910000
• Optionally use --verbose parameter to see what is written to each registers
• Warning: Use this tool for debugging only, since it accesses directly the registers from the user space and requires therefore root priviledges!
• You have been warned... :-)
• Optionally, you can trigger an interrupt using message unit (MU) to the M4 core to get RPMsg started - this is normally done by Linux Kernel during startup: ./m4fwloader kick 0
• Whole usage is here:
  • m4fwloader [filename.bin] [0xLOADADDR] [--verbose] # loads new firmware
  • or: m4fwloader stop # holds the auxiliary core in reset
  • or: m4fwloader start # releases the auxiliary core from reset
  • or: m4fwloader kick [n] # triggers interrupt on RPMsg virtqueue n

[evanthompson]

I can't get this utility to work on an i.mx7. Could you help me out? I've started a forum post here: https://community.nxp.com/message/936211 

[joseeslava]

This is maybe an obvious question, but could you confirm that this tool runs on Linux on Cortex A core?

[dry]

I've forked out from original, and did bug fixes to it.  (It really wouldn't work at all without it. )

Find fork here:   GitHub - dry-75/imx-m4fwloader: Tool for loading firmware to M4 core on i.MX6SX and 7D 

Tested on what I work with now - iMX7D. OCRAM and TCM  memory.

Thank you for the tool. 

[dry]

Try the fork with fixes.  Works for me on IMX7D,A7,Linux.

[dry]

Updated by branch as per iMX7 DRM 2018 update and omissions, as per discussion here (and my support request ticket ..)

https://community.nxp.com/thread/482778