Hello people,
I'm currently trying to enable the SPI peripheral on my beaglebone black to get access to the /dev/spidev* devices. However all my tries have been unsuccessful so far.
I mainly followed this and this thread.
What seems to work is to apply the device tree overlay BB-SPIDEV0-00A0.dtbo. But the problem is that the corresponding interface under /dev/ doesn't appear. I can see the overlay is applied under /proc/device-tree/chosen/overlays/ and the kernel also loads the spidev kernel module, so that seems to work. Also there are no relevant errors in the U-boot log or the kernel log. There is no mentioning of spi in the kernel log at all. So this is not the issue.
There was also some mentioning of the necessity of disabling the hdmi port in order to use the SPI ports. Reading the elinux wiki it sounds as disabling the hdmi port is only necessary if one wants to use SPI1 but not for SPI0 peripheral. And indeed when I also load the SPI1 overlay, I get some PIN errors in the kernel log.
I also tried to disable HDMI in various different ways, but the SPI device never appeared. One thing I can say is that summers method described here, doesn't work (anymore). I get the following errors in the U-boot log multiple times:
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'l')ibfdt fdt_path_offset() returned FDT_ERR_NOTFOUND