Mity CPU Platforms » MitySOM-5CSX Altera Cyclone V

Hello Brian,

This is a good question and a normal question for customers that would like to put eMMC on their baseboard.

The recommended way to do this would be to store the preloader and U-Boot in the QSPI NOR flash that is on the SOM. All the other components (FPGA, kernel, rootfs, DTB) can be stored on the MMC device. The reason why the preloader and U-Boot would go into NOR flash is because Altera has a command line utility called quartus_hps, which allows for loading an image into the QSPI flash over JTAG. Another option would be to program the QSPI NOR in another baseboard that boots from a valid SD card and have that program the NOR flash.

Once the QSPI NOR is programmed and you can get to U-Boot, programming the eMMC from U-Boot would be fairly straight forward. At the U-Boot level you would have access to network or the console port to get the second image with the FPGA/DTB/kernel/rootfs and copy those into the eMMC.

• BSEL (boot select pin) must be set to boot from QSPI
• The preloader must be built to boot U-Boot from QSPI not MMC
• The MitySOM-5CSE-L2-3Y8 has 16MB of QSPI NOR, which is way more than needed for the preloader and U-Boot but not really enough to store all the other components
• Using quartus_hps and JTAG is fairly slow at programming U-Boot/preloader, this usually takes ~6 minutes

Here are some references:
Utilizing QSPI NOR Memory
Building u-Boot and Preloader
First (CS0) Bootable NOR Flash Memory Map

I hope this post is helpful and let me know if there is anything I can clarify better.

Dan

Hi Dan,

Thanks for the direction on this. I cant seem to get the Kernel to boot. I have successfully loaded pre-loader and u-boot over QSPI via making the boot_image.bin. I can TFTP the Kernel and .dtb to the board. But the Kernel hangs after ""Starting Kernel... Uncompressing Linux... done, booting the kernel.""

--NFS is enabled in Kernel build

The boot environment is modified as follows to utilize TFTP and NFS.

nfsboot=setenv bootargs console=ttyS0,115200 root=/dev/nfs nfsroot=192.168.7.22:/export/users ip=192.168.7.1:192.1 68.7.22:192.168.255.255:255.255.0.0:socfpga:eth0:off;bootm 0x7fc0 - 0x00000100
nfsdir=/export/users
nfsip=192.168.7.22
nfsipopt=192.168.7.1:192.168.7.22:192.168.255.255:255.255.0.0:socfpga:eth0:off
nfsroot=/dev/nfs

I feel like this is a simple configuration issue. I just haven't been able to isolate the problem.

Any help would be much appreciated.

The boot terminal output is attached to this post.

Thanks,

Brian

Hi Brian,

I've seen this behavior happen if the FPGA isn't programmed and the DTS is trying to use soft IP cores in the FPGA. If you are still using the dtb we provide for the dev kit, we use soft GPIO cores in the FPGA and the kernel will try to talk to them during boot up, which if the FPGA isn't configured it will hang the processor.

Dan

Dan,

Thanks so much!! Removed my soft IP from the .dts and generated new .dtb to transfer via TFTP with the Kernel. Ran nfsboot and Linux booted as expected. From there, I was successful in transferring the custom files from the NFS to the eMMC with the dd command from the linux terminal in putty. Restarted the board with boot select pins to boot from eMMC and my custom configuration (per-loader, u-boot, Kernel, dtb, rbf, etc.. boots properly..

Thanks again for the support!

Brian

You're welcome! Glad to hear you got it up and running!

Dan