Hi all,
I have an i.MX8 MINI EVK coming in to evaluate for a custom board variant we are designing.
I see there are some i.MX8 boards supported (Compulab MX8M, Variscite Dart MX8M).
I also see there is support for the i.MX8 Mini in meta-freescale.
Where would you recommend I start to take existing configurations to add i.MX8 MINI EVK support as as a stepping stone to supporting our TBD custom board.
Maybe https://github.com/balena-os/balena-variscite-mx8 ?
Thanks,
Alex
Hey Alex,
https://github.com/balena-os/balena-variscite imx8m-var-dart should be a good starting point for supporting this board. The machine definition is created in the balena layers (https://github.com/balena-os/balena-variscite/blob/master/layers/meta-resin-imx6ul-var-dart/conf/machine/imx8m-var-dart.conf) so that could be an additional useful bit or figuring out if fsl upstream has support for your board.
Regards,
Andrei
Checking again the repo you pointed to, it seems like it is probably a better starting point. I was confused by the fact that master only had a README file and I though it got moved in the repo Iām mentioning above. So yes, https://github.com/balena-os/balena-variscite-mx8/tree/mx8_reintegration_sumo might be a good starting point for your board.
Yeah I was a bit confused by that.
Thanks for that @agherzan - itās been a while - hope youāre well?
We were talking about Balena.io the other day in the office. Still very keen to get you guys up to speak at IoT Liverpool if the team are up for it!
Iām alright. Waiting for the summer as we seem to skip the spring this year. Hope everything is fine on your side too.
Iām not sure what are the plans in regards to attending that event but Iāll reach internally and see if we have any plans.
Thanks Andrei
I am revisiting this to try to get the EVK up and running as we need support for a project. Any thoughts appreciated as the current i.MX8MM board images donāt run up on the i.MX8MM EVK
@ajlennon indeed, the current images use customized BSPs provided by Boundary Devices, Compulab, Variscite, etc. I recommend dropping an eye on the GitHub - balena-os/balena-fsl-arm: Balena support for Freescale boards repository, the Nitrogen8MM device-type should be very similar to the one you are interested in adding support for.
Weāve forked and extended the balena-fs-arm layer and built for the i.MX8MM EVK LPDRR4 board.
Weāre waiting for the build to finish and will test tomorrow. Wish us luck!
Hummm
ERROR: balena-image-1.0-r0 do_resin_boot_dirgen_and_deploy: /work/build/tmp/deploy/images/imx8mm-lpddr4-evk/extra_uEnv.txt is an invalid path referenced in BALENA_BOOT_PARTITION_FILES.
ERROR: balena-image-1.0-r0 do_resin_boot_dirgen_and_deploy: ExecutionError('/work/build/tmp/work/imx8mm_lpddr4_evk-poky-linux/balena-image/1.0-r0/temp/run.do_resin_boot_dirgen_and_deploy.3846', 1, None, None)
ERROR: Logfile of failure stored in: /work/build/tmp/work/imx8mm_lpddr4_evk-poky-linux/balena-image/1.0-r0/temp/log.do_resin_boot_dirgen_and_deploy.3846
NOTE: recipe balena-image-1.0-r0: task do_resin_boot_dirgen_and_deploy: Failed
Bugger. Forgot all the machine specific overrides 
Weāve got a really weird problem trying to bring up the i.MX8MM EVK here.
Then it just resets and starts u-boot. No warning. No errors. No kernel panic. Just a reset.
Weāve found that we can set the init level on the kernel command line to 1 and we can boot to the recovery shell and everything is fine. However as soon as we go to init 2 the services start and it resets.
Itās really strange we donāt get any kind of error or warning. Weāve added debugging into the systemd log which Iāve attached but this is a bit baffling.
One of the differences I was wondering about was whether init 1 is single core and 2 is multi-core.
Weāre baffled. Any advice would be appreciated !!! @mpous
Thanks, Alex
log.txt (340.2 KB)
Hi,
Your log ends with
systemd-journald.service: Got notification message from PID 753 (WATCHDOG=1)
systemd-udevd.service: Got notification message from PID 782 (WATCHDOG=1)
Could it be related to the watchdog?
In a different thread there was a link to the watchdog configuration; maybe increasing the timeout might help? Are you certain the hardware (not software) watchdog is properly cleared?
The original thread was about a raspberry pi; you may need to look around and twiddle some things to handle the i.MX hardware watchdog.
This is very interesting thanks. I should have thought of the watchdog. Iāll do some investigating!
I think/hope that weāre away from the Raspberry Pi now as weāre basing on the i.MX8MM board support in balena-fsl-arm. tbh I am surprised I am having so many issues as I expected one of those images to just ārun upā.
Thanks again - I will go and have a look. Itās odd that it is happy in init 1 but not in init 2 and above
Cheers!
Alex
OK I have a PR now which builds, boots, and onboards to the cloud. Iāve run up the simple python hello world server successfully.
Could somebody review please @mpous ?
Hi,
glad to hear you got something working.
Out of curiosity (and future reference): how did you solve your issue?
I had a range of issues. Including building u-boot appropriately for the i.MX8MM. You can see the changes I made above. The issue that took ages to identify was that it was rebooting without warning as the kernel for to the command line. This turned out to be because it was writing to the wrong console device at /dev/ttymxc0 instead of /dev/ttymxc1. This shouldnāt have been a major problem excepting that for some reason writes to that device cause the board to reboot without warningā¦
