Why did I brick my Freedom Dev Board?

[timhammer]

(Yes, it may sound a bit existential, but it is in fact a real question.)

I recently obtained a Freedom Development board. After booting it up with the pre-installed firmware:

• U-Boot 2016.01LS1012A-SDK+g7944a94 (Aug 30 2016 - 13:13:19 +0800)
• Linux ls1012afrdm 4.1.8-rt8+g2511ec0 #1 SMP Tue Aug 30 13:15:03 CST 2016 aarch64 GNU/Linux

I thought I was ready to build and install updated firmware.

I followed the info in https://github.com/qoriq-open-source/yocto-sdk to create working repository on build machine, setup for ls1012afrdm and build fsl-image-networking. This all went well.

When attempting to download and boot from U-Boot, the tftp download of itbImage-fsl-image-networking-ls1012afrdm.bin continually error-ed with "Synchronous Abort" handler

The Getting Started guide (FRDM-LS1012AGSG.pdf) provides the steps for updating board images from prebuilt binaries on the ISO images. I mistakenly assumed that since the build had created the necessary files, I could use them instead of downloading an ISO image.

(There does not seem to be a kernel file (kernel-ls1212afrdm.itb) in the build output, but getting at least the RCW and U-Boot updated was a good first step- I would work on the kernel and rootfs later.)

The tftp download of the PBL_0x33_0x05_800_250_1000_default.bin file I built completed no problem and the sf commands completed OK.

However, now on reset my board does not come up.

After the fact, I came across a thread https://community.nxp.com/thread/459916 that indicate byte-swapping is required:

If you built RCW and u-Boot with bitbake, make sure you byte-swapped them before programming. Alternatively, use the most recent SDK pre-built u-Boot and RCW.

I subsequently came across a thread which stated that the need to byte-swap had been incorporated into the build process at some point, however, now I am unable to find that thread and cannot recall what that point was so I do not know if that change is in my build environment/repo.

I will be receiving my CodeWarrior tap and probe early next week and will attempt to recover the board using the information found in this comment (obtained from this thread; seems to be same/similar to info in this thread.)

I will start with a pre-built RCW and other binaries from the ISO to be safe.

But I would like to know what I need to do different to get my build (RCW and other binaries) to work.

• Do I need to do the byte-swap with the rocko branch of the qoriq yocto-sdk?
• Did I choose the wrong board (setup-env -m option)?
• Something else entirely?

Thank you!

.Tim

[Pavel]

Byte swapping is needed for RCW for the LS1012a QSPI.

See examples of command sequence on the page 123 of the NXP LSDK 1803 documentation:

https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/supporting-information/LSDK-KC-REV18.03.pdf

and

page 142 of NXP SDK 2.0-1703 documentation:

https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/supporting-information/QORIQ-SDK-2.0-IC-REV0.pdf

Look at the Section 26.9 of the LS1012a Reference Manual:

By default the data is always returned in 64 bit BE format on the AHB bus.

It is shows that 64-bit byte swapping is needed for RCW.

Have a great day,
Pavel Chubakov

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[timhammer]

I was unable to find a pre-built RCW using the link and information in the Getting Started guide. Instead, I have been looking at the Layerscape SDK.

In the Components --> Images "collection", the only item I find for the ls1012afrdm board is firmware_ls1012afrdm_uboot_qspiboot.img. So I cloned the rcw repo from CodeAurora, checked out the LSDK-18.03 tag and built the RCW for the board there.

Can I assume that the resulting rcw_800.bin in the N_SSNP_3305 directory is ready to be flashed to the board as is?

Thanks!

.Tim