Release Notes for the QNX Neutrino 6.4.0 BSP for Freescale i.MX25 3DS PDK Development Build#

System requirements#

• QNX Neutrino RTOS 6.4.0
• Board version: i.MX25 3DS (PDK) V1.1
• ARM926 processor
• 64 MB DDR SDRAM
• 2 GB NAND flash

Host development system

• QNX Momentics 6.4.0
• IDE 4.6.0
• Terminal emulation program (Qtalk, Momentics IDE Terminal, tip, HyperTerminal, etc.)
• RS-232 serial port and a straight-through serial cable
• Ethernet link

System Layout#

Memory layout

The interrupt vector table can be found in the buildfile located at src/hardware/startup/boards/3dsmx25/build

Getting Started#

Starting Neutrino#

Step 1: Build the BSP
You can build a BSP OS image from the source code. For instructions about building a BSP OS image, please refer to the chapter Working with a BSP in the Building Embedded Systems manual.

Copy or transfer the IFS image into your tftp server's directory.

• When compiling using the command line, the ifs image is in the images directory.
• When compiling using the IDE, the IFS image is by default at /Workspace_root_dir/bsp-freescale-3dsmx35/Images.

Step 2: Connect your hardware

1. Set up the board to 3-Stack mode. Refer to the manual for the correct default jumper settings to use for the Personality and Debug boards.
2. Connect one end of the serial cable to the CON4 (UART-DCE) serial port on the debug board.
3. Connect the other end of the serial cable to the first available serial port of your host machine (e.g. ser1 on a Neutrino host).
4. Connect an RJ-45 Ethernet cable to the J1 10/100 BaseT Ethernet RJ45 Connector on the debug board.
5. Connect the other end of the Ethernet cable to the Ethernet network where a TFTP server (which you'll use to transfer the boot image) exists.

On your host machine, start your favorite terminal program with these settings:

• Baud: 115200
• Bits: 8
• Stop bits: 1
• Parity: none

Then, apply power to the target. You should see output similar to the following:

++NAND: RCSR=64000150
Searching for BBT table in the flash ...
.
Found version 1 Bbt0 at block 8191 (0x7ffc0000)
Total bad blocks: 0
... Read from 0x03ec0000-0x03f00000 at 0x000c0000: ..
... Read from 0x03eb3000-0x03eb4000 at 0x000ff000: .
Turning on PMIC regulators: 1,2,3,4,5

LAN92xx Driver version 1.1
SMSC LAN9217: ID = 0x117a REV = 0x0
[Warning] FEC not connect right PHY: ID=5c8000
FEC: [ HALF_DUPLEX ] [ disconnected ] [ 10M bps ]:
Ethernet eth0: MAC address 00:04:9f:00:a5:16
IP: 10.42.104.42/255.255.240.0, Gateway: 10.42.96.1
Default server: 10.42.97.136
hardware reset by POR

Clock input is 24 MHz
Booting from [NAND flash]
[0x80000000 bytes]: 8192 blocks of 128 pages of 2048 bytes each.


RedBoot(tm) bootstrap and debug environment [ROMRAM]
Non-certified release, version FSL 200910 - built 08:59:52, Mar  2 2009

Platform: MX25 3-Stack (Freescale i.MX25 based) PASS 1.1 [x32 DDR]
Copyright (C) 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 Red Hat, Inc.
Copyright (C) 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 eCosCentric Limited

RAM: 0x00000000-0x03f00000, [0x000953e8-0x03eb1000] available
FLASH: 0x00000000 - 0x80000000, 8192 blocks of 0x00040000 bytes each.
RedBoot> 
# 

Step 3: Setup the environment

At the RedBoot prompt, issue the fconfig command to change the current environment.

The current configurations will be displayed; change the configuration if you want.

Run script at boot: false
Use BOOTP for network configuration: false
Gateway IP address: 192.168.1.1
Local IP address: 192.168.1.202
Local IP address mask: 255.255.255.0
Default server IP address: 192.168.1.15
Board specifics: 0
Console baud rate: 115200
Set eth0 network hardware address [MAC]: false
GDB connection port: 9000
Force console for special debug messages: false
Network debug at boot time: false

Step 4: Boot the IFS image

Once the above setup is complete, you can run the load command at the RedBoot prompt to download the image: load -r -b 0x00100000 -h 192.168.1.15 /tftpboot/ifs-3dsmx25.bin

Replace 192.168.1.15 with the IP address of your TFTP server and /tftpboot/ifs-3dsmx25.bin with the path of the image on the TFTP server.

RedBoot will display the follow message and start downloading the boot image:

Using default protocol (TFTP)

If the image is successfully loaded RedBoot will display:

Raw file loaded 0x00100000-0x002aae8b, assumed entry at 0x00100000

Type run to jump to startup and boot the IFS image. You should see QNX Neutrino boot, followed by the welcome message on your terminal screen:

load entry_address=0x100000
virt_addr=0x100000
phys_addr=0x80100000
CPU0: Dcache: 512x32 WB
CPU0: Icache: 512x32
CPU0: 41069264: arm926 rev 4 396MHz

System page at phys:80010000 user:fc404000 kern:fc404000
Starting next program at vfe03c830
cpu_startnext: cpu0 -> fe03c830
Welcome to QNX Neutrino 6.4.0 on the Freescale MX25 3DS Board (ARM 926 core)
#

You can test the OS simply by executing any shell builtin command or any command residing within the OS image (e.g. ls).

Step 5: Replace the ~Redboot bootloader with a native QNX IPL and OS image in flash

At some point, you may wish to replace the ~Redboot bootloader with the native QNX IPL code. This may be desirable once you've tweaked the OS image exactly the way you want it, and you want the board to boot the image automatically, immediately on power up.

To replace the ~Redboot bootloader:

1. Modify your buildfile to generate a binary image.
2. Run the mkflashimage.sh script, inside the images directory of the BSP. The output file from this script is a binary ROM image of the IPL called image.rom.

The mkflashimage.sh script will convert the IPL image to binary and prefix it with a 16k pad.

Here is the mkflashimage.sh script:

#!/bin/sh
# Script to build a binary IPL for the i.MX25 3DS Board that can be programmed
# into NAND flash at the beginning of block 0
#
# Example usage: ./mkflashimage.sh arm/le/ipl-3dsmx25

if [ "$1" == "" ]; then
	filename="../install/armle/boot/sys/ipl-3dsmx25"
else
	filename=$1
fi

echo "Converting $filename"

# Convert the IPL into binary format
${QNX_HOST}/usr/bin/ntoarm-objcopy --input-format=elf32-littlearm --output-format=binary $filename ./tmp-ipl.bin

# Pad the result to 16K (this will ensure the assumptions within the IPL are correct)
mkrec -s16k -ffull -r tmp-ipl.bin > image.rom

# Clean up after ourselves
rm -f tmp-*

echo "You can now program image.rom to NAND block 0"

3. Burn image.rom to the board's NAND using the Advanced Toolkit. The Advanced Toolkit can be found on Freescale's i.MX25 Product Development Kit download page

Set the Personality Board switches to the following settings:

Set the Debug Board to the following settings:

Install the tool on a Windows host and connect it to the i.MX25 via the USB OTG connector on the Personality Board. Power up the board and install the Windows drivers as specified in the Advanced Toolkit installation notes.

Launch Advanced Toolkit and select the following options:

i.MX CPU: i.MX25_TO1.1
Device memory: DDR2
Communication Channel: USB

Click Next, then click Flash Tool. You can now program the image.rom file to NAND block 0. You should also program it to NAND block 1 when done development as it will be used by the boot ROM as the backup boot block.

To boot from NAND, first power off the board, disconnect the USB cable from the OTG port and set the Personality Board switches to the following settings:

Set the Debug Board to the following settings:

Powering on will now boot the IPL.

Driver Command Summary#

The following table summarizes the commands to launch the various drivers.

Some of the drivers are commented out in the default buildfile. To use the drivers in the target hardware, you'll need to uncomment them in your buildfile, rebuild the image, and load the image into the board.

Startup, USB, and Graphics have additional details:

Startup#

startup-3dsmx25 [startup-options]

Some modules aren't enabled after boot up, so you need to use command line options to startup to enable them. These options must be passed before any other startup options.

About Graphics#

The LCDC has a requirement that a displayable surface not cross a 4MB memory boundary. To prevent this it is recommended that memory be reserved for graphics on a 4MB from start-up (using -r option) and then this memory area provided to the driver using the vbase and vsize options in imx25.conf. (see imx25.conf for details on these options)

Known Issues for This BSP#

• The serial driver devc-sermx1 doesn't support hardware flow control, and will be investigated for a future release. (Ref# 57988)
• The Touch Screen is currently not operational.
• The speed and duplex options for io-pkt may not work in all cases. We suggest you do not use those options and allow io-pkt to auto negotiate the link settings.
• The i.MX25 (ARM926) processor doesn't support unaligned accesses in hardware. If an application (e.g. pwmopts) tries to access data that isn't aligned on a 32-bit boundary, a bus error will occur. To avoid this memory fault, you can enable the software emulation of unaligned accesses by starting procnto with the -ae option. (Ref# 71252)