Notes on Pico-iMX6UL kit

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Notes on Pico-iMX6UL kit

Postby antonio1 » Fri May 05, 2017 3:36 pm

I could not find any post on the Pico-iMX6UL kit so this post describes my experience with it and also has a couple of questions.

Pico-iMX6UL is a product designed by Wandboard seemingly as a replacement for Hobbitboard:

http://www.wandboard.org/index.php/details/pico-imx6ul

The Hobbitboard is supported by Arch and I followed the steps in the page below for installation:
https://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv7/freescale/hobbitboard

The Pico-iMX6UL kit I got comes in a box with the Wandboard logo. It is made by Technexion, a Taiwanese company that makes many variations of the Wandboard SOM, with different types of storage, with and without Wifi, industrial and commercial components, etc.

http://www.technexion.com/products/system-on-modules/pico/pico-compute-modules


RAM

There seem to be a few differences between Pico-iMX6UL and Hobbitboard, a notable one is that it comes with 512 MB of RAM. When I install Arch following the steps for the Hobbitboard only 256 MB are used.

Question: what is the best way of using the full 512 MB? Changing a u-boot parameter?


bsdtar

I got a few errors when running bsdtar. Interestingly these errors appear when the host is Fedora 24 but not if the host is Arch. I don't know the reason for the errors (SELinux on Fedora?).

$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', '# bsdtar -xpf ArchLinuxARM-armv7-latest.tar.gz -C mnt
bsdtar: Ignoring malformed pax extended attribute
bsdtar: Ignoring malformed pax extended attribute
bsdtar: Ignoring malformed pax extended attribute
bsdtar: Ignoring malformed pax extended attribute
bsdtar: Error exit delayed from previous errors.')


Ethernet

Ethernet worked out of the box for IPv4 (I did not test IPv6). The board got its IP address with DHCP. Unlike with the Hobbitboard there was no need to set the Ethernet address (which by the way was printed on white labels on the SOM and box).


Reboot

The reboot command was not fully working after install, i. e. systemd did its job of shutting down the various processes but then I had to press the Reset button to complete reboot. This problem then disappeared seemingly after I ran the command “pacman -Sy uboot-hobbitboard”.


Broadcom firmware


I ran the command “pacman -Sy firmware-hobbitboard” and there were no errors reported. Despite that after reboot dmesg shows issues:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', '
[ 19.472128] brcmfmac mmc1:0001:1: Direct firmware load for brcm/brcmfmac43430-sdio.txt failed with error -2

...

[ 20.504434] brcmfmac: brcmf_sdio_htclk: HT Avail timeout (1000000): clkctl 0x50
[ 21.571436] brcmfmac: brcmf_sdio_htclk: HT Avail timeout (1000000): clkctl 0x50')



No boot out of the box

The kit does not boot out of the box (before Arch installation), u-boot complains about invalid partitions. Another kit that I bought had the same problem. I did not care to investigate as I wanted to put Arch on it anyway.


Bad CRC

The excerpt of the output on the debug port below shows the tail of the messages after I entered the reboot command and the start of the boot. There is a message about “*** Warning - bad CRC, using default environment”. I am not sure what what it means. This is a minor issue as it seems to have no ill effect.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', '
[17653.827900] reboot: Restarting system
à

U-Boot 2016.09-1 (Sep 18 2016 - 19:20:41 -0600) Arch Linux ARM

CPU: Freescale i.MX6UL rev1.0 at 396 MHz
Reset cause: POR
Board: PICO-IMX6UL-EMMC
I2C: ready
DRAM: 256 MiB
PMIC: PFUZE3000 DEV_ID=0x30 REV_ID=0x11
MMC: FSL_SDHC: 0
*** Warning - bad CRC, using default environment

In: serial
Out: serial
Err: serial
Net: FEC
Hit any key to stop autoboot: 0
Booting from mmc ...
5799136 bytes read in 193 ms (28.7 MiB/s)
36132 bytes read in 814 ms (43 KiB/s)
Kernel image @ 0x82000000 [ 0x000000 - 0x587ce0 ]
## Flattened Device Tree blob at 83000000
Booting using the fdt blob at 0x83000000
Using Device Tree in place at 83000000, end 8300bd23

Starting kernel ...

[ 0.000000] Booting Linux on physical CPU 0x0')
antonio1
 
Posts: 5
Joined: Thu May 04, 2017 10:14 am

Re: Notes on Pico-iMX6UL kit

Postby nachopro » Fri May 19, 2017 3:06 am

Hi, Thanks! Is hard to read about this device.
After my installation, the ip a command doesnot show a wlan0 interface

Do you have the WiFi Working? Thanks!
nachopro
 
Posts: 1
Joined: Fri May 19, 2017 3:02 am

Re: Notes on Pico-iMX6UL kit

Postby antonio1 » Fri May 19, 2017 10:43 am

Like I said above, there is a problem with the Broadcom firmware. The Broadcom chip does WiFi and Bluetooth. That may be one of the reasons why WiFi is not working.
antonio1
 
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Joined: Thu May 04, 2017 10:14 am


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