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Getting Started with theTI Jacinto BSP

Getting Started with This BSP

© 2008, QNX Software Systems GmbH & Co. KG. All rights reserved.

Contents

Running QNX Neutrino on the TI Jacinto EVM

Before you begin

For information about the hardware or firmware, refer to the documentation for your board. You may also find the following website useful:

www.ti.com

We assume that you're already familiar with the following docs:

Title Chapter
Building Embedded Systems Making an OS image; for customizing the BSP from the command line
Building Embedded Systems Working with a BSP; for building the BSP
IDE User's Guide Building OS and Flash Images; for customizing the BSP within the IDE

What's in this BSP?

See the latest release notes for details on what is included in this BSP.

Devices supported

Neutrino supports the following devices on the TI Jacinto EVM:

Note:
  • Some of these 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.
  • If you need support for a particular device that isn't listed here, please contact us. The solution may be as simple as modifying an existing driver, which you might be able to do yourself, or it may involve more extensive support (e.g. a Custom Engineering arrangement).
  • This BSP doesn't include DSPLink. Please download and install the DSPLink archive separately.

    Contact a QNX technical support representative or Field Application Engineer to help you decide how to proceed.

System requirements

Target system

Host development system

Note: For other system requirements (e.g. disk, RAM), see the installation notes for QNX Momentics.

Step 1: Connect your hardware

  1. Connect the null-modem serial cable to the serial port of the Jacinto and the serial port of your host machine.
    Note: If you have a Neutrino host with a serial mouse, you may have to move it to the second serial port on your host, because some terminal programs require the first serial port.
  2. Connect an RJ-45 ethernet cable between the ethernet port on the Jacinto EVM and your local network.
  3. Connect the power supply cable on your board.

Step 2: Build the BSP

You can build a BSP OS image from the source code contained in the BSP package.

For instructions about building a BSP OS image, please refer to the chapter Working with a BSP in the Building Embedded Systems manual.

Step 3: Transfer the OS image to the target

Boot OS images by ROM monitor

Note: Make sure the host machine is capable of handling TFTP requests (see inetd documentation for details).
  1. On your host machine, start your favorite terminal program with these settings:
    • Baud: 115200
    • Bits: 8
    • Stop bits: 1
    • Parity: none
  2. Start your target. You should see output similar to the following: 
    U-Boot 1.1.3 (Jan 22 2007 - 16:13:39)                     
                                                          
U-Boot code: 62080000 -> 620977D0  BSS: -> 6209C4C8       
RAM Configuration:                                        
Bank #0: 60000000 128 MB                                  
                                                          
******************** DRI version 0.05 ******************* 
qjwang@ti.com                                             
                                                          
ARM Clock :- 324MHz                                       
SDRAM Clock :- 110MHz                                     
SPANSION NOR Flash: 64 MB                                 
In:    serial                                             
Out:   serial                                             
Err:   serial                                             
Hit any key to stop autoboot:  3
  3. Press any key to stop autobooting, and then you'll see the Jacinto prompt: 
    Jacinto #
  4. At the Jacinto # prompt, issue the following command to show the current environment: 
    Jacinto # printenv
  5. You can change the current settings using the setenv command to configure the following parameters: 
    Jacinto # setenv netmask 255.255.240.0
Jacinto # setenv ipaddr 10.42.101.242
Jacinto # setenv gatewayip 10.42.96.1
Jacinto # setenv serverip 10.42.98.211
Jacinto # setenv 'bootcmd tftpboot 40010000;go 40010000'
  6. Once you've configured these parameters, use the saveenv command to store your changes: 
    Jacinto # saveenv
  7. Restart your target. You should see output similar to the following: 
    Using MAC Address 00:0E:99:02:61:53                                                          
TFTP from server 10.42.98.211; our IP address is 10.42.101.242                               
Filename 'ifs-jacinto.raw'.                                                                  
Load address: 0x40010000                                                                     
Loading: T T T T T T T #################################################################     
         ##########################################################                          
done                                                                                         
Bytes transferred = 627276 (9924c hex)                                                       
## Starting application at 0x40010000 ...                                                    
Dcache: 512x32 WB                                                                            
Icache: 512x32                                                                               
arm926 rev 5 324MHz                                                                          
                                                                                             
System page at phys:40166000 user:fc404000 kern:fc404000                                     
Starting next program at vfe0203a4                                                           
Welcome to QNX Neutrino 6.x on a TI Jacinto EVM                                              
#

Boot OS images by IPL

Note: Before burning the IPL, you might want to save the first 1 MB of flash in order to save the ROM monitor.
  1. Run mkflashimage in the BSP's images directory to create a combined IPL/OS image to use when burning the flash. 
    # ./mkflashimage
    Note: You need to change the default image filename to ifs-jacinto.bin, and you can ignore the warning message “Warning: Output file cannot represent architecture UNKNOWN!”
  2. Download the ipl-ifs-jacinto.bin image to your target board, /dev/shmem/ipl-ifs-jacinto.bin.
  3. Make sure the target can read the image you want to copy, and then execute the following commands in the Neutrino shell to burn the IPL-IFS images to flash: 
    # devf-generic -s0x20000000,64M
# flashctl -p/dev/fs0 -l6M -ve          
# cp -V /dev/shmem/ipl-ifs-jacinto.bin /dev/fs0
  4. Reboot the target; the IPL should come up. Either press s to transfer the OS image serially using sendnto, or if you generated ipl-ifs-jacinto.bin and copied it to /dev/fs0, press f to scan the flash for an os image.
    Note: When booting serially, images larger than 6 MB won't load unless you first modify the IPL source.

Step 4: Start working with Neutrino OS

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

Once the initial image is running, you can update the OS image using the network and flash drivers. For sample command lines, please see the “Summary of driver commands” section.

System Layout

The table below depicts the memory layout for the image and for the flash.

Item Address
OS image loaded at: 0x40010000
Flash base address 0x20000000

Summary of driver commands

The driver command lines below are specific to the TI Jacinto EVM board. See the online docs for each driver for additional command-line options and other details.

Note: Some of the following 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:

Command:
startup-jacinto -L 0x67800000,0x800000 -vvvvv

Serial:

Command:
devc-ser8250 -e -F -S -b 115200 -c24000000/16 0x01c20000^2,43

Required binaries:

Flash(NOR):

Command:
devf-generic -s0x20000000,64M

Required binaries:

SPI:

Command:
spi-master -d dra446 base=0x01c24c00,irq=37,edmairq=0xc128,edmachannel=40

Required binaries:

Required libraries:

I2C:

Command:
i2c-dm6446 -p0x01C21000 -i39 --u0
i2c-dm6446 -p0x01C21000 -i39 --u1

Required binaries:

USB:

Command:
io-usb -d jacinto ioport=0x01c42000,irq=2

Required binaries:

Required libraries:

Ethernet:

Command:
io-net -dsmc9000-jacinto ioport=0x2a000000,irq=106,mac=xxxxxxxxxxxx -ptcpip

Required binaries:

Required libraries:

Block and SD:

Command:
devb-eide-dm644x blk cache=12M
devb-sd-jacinto blk cache=12M

Required binaries:

Required libraries:

Audio:

Command:
io-audio -d dra44x-jacinto
Note: This driver must be started after the I2C driver is active.

Required binaries:

Required libraries:

Graphics:

Command:
io-display -dvid=0,did=0

Required binaries:

Required libraries:

Required config files:

Note: For more information about these commands, see the Neutrino Utilities Reference.

About graphics

The graphics driver supports these display interfaces:

It's possible to do dual-display output using the VPSS analog output and the Internal Raster Controller. You can set this up in the jacinto.conf configuration file.

VPSS display interface

The driver supports the following analog outputs:

You can use jacinto.conf to configure digital output. We tested the driver with the LG Philips LB080WV3 LCD.

The VPSS controller supports the following layers or “OSD windows”:

You can control the following features for all layers:

The OSD windows can support the follow features:

You can enable or configure OSD Rectangular Cursor support using jacinto.conf.

Note: The OSD window restrictions (from the TI documentation) include:
  • Video Window 1 and all OSD windows must be fully contained within Video Window 0.
  • Only one video layer can be set to RGB888 at one time.
  • Video Window 1's start X position must be offset a multiple of 16 pixels from the left edge of Video Window 0.

Raster controller

The Raster Controller has been validated with the Sharp LQ050Q5DR01 TFT LCD. The Raster controller supports a single layer and runs only at the RGB565 pixel format.

Optional graphics driver rendering acceleration

The graphics driver can run with SW rendering or can have accelerated 2D/3D rendering using a DSP image containing the TES eVRU graphics library.

Hardware-accelerated 2D rendering using the eVRU graphics library is supported for RGB565, RGB888, and ARGB8888 color formats. The 2D accelerated features are:

Note: The alpha map must be the same size as the fill/blit size.

Hardware-accelerated 3D rendering using the eVRU graphics library is limited, and is disabled by default to allow OpenGLES conformance. To enable the accelerated 3D rendering, set the sw3d option in jacinto.conf to 0 (sw3d=0). When enabled, the following features are accelerated for RGB565 and RGB888:

Optional graphics memory management

The Jacinto has two memory buses (EMIFA, EMIFB). We've found that for certain graphics operations, performance is improved if the source and destination surfaces are on separate EMIFs.

You can reserve memory from the system by using the -rBASE,SIZE option, where BASE is the physical base address of memory, and SIZE is the number of bytes to reserve.

To take advantage of this, you can specific two memory regions to devg-jacinto.so, using the following new options in jacinto.conf:

abase
The physical base address of the reserved memory pool. This must match the address specified to startup with the -r option.
asize
The size of the memory pool. This must match the size specified to startup with the -r option.
bbase
The physical base address of reserved memory pool. This must match the address specified to startup with the -r option.
bsize
The size of the memory pool. This must match the size specified to startup with the -r option.

The EMIFA base address is 0x40000000 and is 128 MB in size, and the EMIFB base address is 0x60000000 and is 128 MB in size.

In developing/testing this functionality, we used the following startup line: 

startup-jacinto -r 0x60000000,0x200000 -r0x47E00000,0x200000 -L 0x67800000,0x800000  -vvvvv

The above line reserves 2 MB in EMIFA and 2 MB in EMIFB. The resulting entries in jacinto.conf are: 

bbase=0x60000000,bsize=0x200000,abase=0x47e00000,asize=0x200000

The devg-jacinto.so driver creates two memory pools to allocate surfaces from while surfaces can be allocated.

By default, the driver attempts to allocate memory from POOL B (specified by bbase and bsize). If this allocation fails, the surface is allocated by the graphics framework from general system memory. It doesn't attempt to allocate the surface from the other pool.

You can select POOL A (specified by abase and asize) by passing in the GF_SURFACE_CREATE_CPU_FAST_ACCESS flag to gf_surface_create() or gf_surface_create_layer() as shown in the following examples: 

if (gf_surface_create( &images[0], device, 100, 100, GF_FORMAT_BGR888,
       NULL, GF_SURFACE_CREATE_2D_ACCESSIBLE |
       GF_SURFACE_CREATE_CPU_FAST_ACCESS) != GF_ERR_OK) {
	return -1;
}

if (gf_surface_create_layer( &t_surface, &info->layer, 1, 0,
       info->width, info->height, info->layer_format,
       NULL, GF_SURFACE_CREATE_CPU_FAST_ACCESS) != GF_ERR_OK) {
   return 0;
}

If this allocation fails, the surface is allocated by the graphics framework from general system memory. It doesn't attempt to allocate the surface from the other pool.

If you don't specify memory regions to that driver, all surfaces are created by the graphics framework in general memory (whether or not memory was reserved at startup).

AVME/devg coexistence

It's possible to have the TI AVME and QNX graphics coexist in the same system. To do this, the following must occur:

For details on the avme options, see jacinto.conf.

Creating a flash partition

  1. Enter the following command to start the flash filesystem driver: 
    devf-generic -s0x20000000,64M
  2. Erase the flash, except for the first 6 MB:
    Note: Because the ROM monitor or IPL/OS image are in the first 6 megabyte of flash , you may not want to erase them. Use the -l (length) and -o (offset) options to avoid these areas. 
    flashctl -p/dev/fs0 -o6M -l58M -ve
  3. Format the partition: 
    flashctl -p/dev/fs0p0 -o6M -l58M -vf
  4. Slay and then restart the driver to mount the new partition: 
    slay devf-generic
devf-generic -s0x20000000,64M

You should now have a /fs0p0 and /fs0p1 directory automounted.

Where do I go from here?

For information on: Go to:
Generating IPL, startup, and other modules from BSP source code Building Embedded Systems, Working with a BSP
Using mkifs to generate an OS image from a buildfile Building Embedded Systems, Making an OS image
Writing, compiling, and debugging your applications using command-line tools Programmer's Guide
Building your applications using the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) IDE User's Guide, Building OS and Flash Images
Writing a device driver DDK Guides
The complete QNX doc set Documentation Roadmap (e.g. under Windows XP via the start menu: All Programs-->QNX Momentics-->Help Documentation)
Release notes www.qnx.com (look for the appropriate release notes after logging into your myQNX account)
Technical support forums See the release notes for details. Look for the appropriate newsgroup.

BSP filename conventions

In QNX BSPs, we use the following conventions for naming files:

Part of filename Description Example
.bin Suffix for binary format file. ifs-artesyn.bin
.build Suffix for buildfile. sandpoint.build
efs- Prefix for QNX Embedded Filesystem file; generated by mkefs. efs-sengine.srec
.elf Suffix for ELF (Executable and Linking Format) file. ipl-ifs-mbx800.elf
ifs- Prefix for QNX Image Filesystem file; generated by mkifs. ifs-800fads.elf
ipl- Prefix for IPL (Initial Program Loader) file. ipl-eagle.srec
.openbios Suffix for OpenBIOS format file. ifs-walnut.openbios
.prepboot Suffix for Motorola PRePboot format file. ifs-prpmc800.prepboot
.srec Suffix for S-record format file. ifs-malta.srec
 
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