Booting Firmware from USB Serial Downloader Print

 

NOTE: For the IMX8M-SOM-BSB rev 1A board, the hardware work-around #19 from this list must be applied to the board.

NOTE: The SD card slot must be empty to avoid booting from SD card due to  the "SD/MMC manufacture mode" feature of  the i.MX8M.

Use the procedure documented below to boot the U-Boot firmware from the USB Serial Downloader:

  1. Download and unpack the tarball with the prebuilt bootable Linux images from the Emcraft site:
    2. $ tar xvfj images-imx8m-beta6.tar.bz2
 ...
imx-boot-imx8m-som-sd.bin
...
$
  2. Download the Manufacturing Tool from NXP website, under Tools/Manufacturing Tools/Linux/
    Manufacturing Toolkit     for Linux L4.9.51 i.MX8MQuad GA.
  3. Unpack the mfgtools-without-rootfs.zip archive located inside L4.9.51_8mq-ga_mfg-tools.tar.gz to an arbitrary directory on a Windows machine (for simplicity, the directory is referenced as d:\mfgtools below).
  4. Open the d:\mfgtools\Drivers\iMX_BulkIO_Driver directory of the unpacked archive in Explorer, click with right button on imxusb.inf and choose Install in the popup menu.
  5. Copy the imx-boot-imx8m-som-sd.bin boot image from the tarball with the prebuilt bootable Linux images to d:\mfgtools\Profiles\Linux\OS Firmware\firmware\.
  6. Add the following text to the end of d:\mfgtools\Profiles\Linux\OS Firmware\ucl2.xml before the last statement:
    7.  <LIST name="uboot" desc="boot u-boot">
        <CMD state="BootStrap" type="boot" body="BootStrap" file =
"firmware/imx-boot-imx8m-som-sd.bin" ifdev="MX8MQ">Loading U-boot</CMD>
        <CMD state="BootStrap" type="jump" > Boot U-boot. </CMD>
  </LIST>
  7. Modify the [LIST] section in d:\mfgtools\cfg.ini as follows:
    8. [LIST]
name = uboot
  8. Make sure no bootable SD card is installed in the card slot on the IMX8M-SOM-BSB board.
  9. Set the S1.1 and S1.2 boot switches to the ON and OFF positions, respectively.
  10. Connect the J12 connector of the IMX8M-SOM-BSB to the Windows host with a USB Type-C cable.
  11. On the host, run d:\mfgtools\MfgTool2.exe and click the Start button in the application GUI.
  12. The system will boot to the U-Boot prompt:
    13. U-Boot 2017.03-00872-g21de0e6 (Apr 05 2018 - 16:53:39 +0300)

CPU:   Freescale i.MX8MQ rev2.0 1500 MHz (running at 1000 MHz)
CPU:   Commercial temperature grade (0C to 95C) at 49C
Reset cause: POR
Model: Emcraft i.MX8M SOM LPDDR4
DRAM:  1 GiB
MMC:   FSL_SDHC: 0, FSL_SDHC: 1
In:    serial
Out:   serial
Err:   serial
Net:   eth0: ethernet@30be0000
Normal Boot
Hit any key to stop autoboot:  0
u-boot=>