OSD32MP1-RED No Pre-loaded Debian Linux

[JensOnOctavo]

Hi, I recently purchased several OSD32PM1-RED development boards from Digikey, and was working through the getting started guide. The guide seems to indicate that the boards have Debian Linux pre-installed and that it should boot if the board is set up to boot from eMMC. This appears to not be the case – the board never boots and there is no traffic on the UART lines. Do these board have Debian Linux pre-installed?

If not, does Octavo provide a pre-compiled eMMC image, or only a SD card image?

[coloradocarlos]

I assume you don’t even see the uBoot menu? If not, the problem is not the version of Linux loaded on the eMMC. For troubleshooting, I suggest downloading the SD card image, write it to the SD card, set the DIP switches appropriately, and boot from the SD card. This would check that the board can come up even if the eMMC has failed or is empty.

[JensOnOctavo]

Thanks for your reply coloradocarlos. I am in the process of loading Linux onto an SD card to boot that way, but I thought in the mean time I might try to learn why the boards I received didn’t come preloaded with with Linux as the guide states. Have you received OSD32MP1-RED boards that came pre-loaded with Debian Linux?

[coloradocarlos]

Yes, our company received 2 RED boards several months ago and they booted up with Debian “out of the box”. We sourced them from Arrow Electronics.

[JensOnOctavo]

Sorry to bother you, because it really doesn’t matter that much, just trying to get to the bottom of this – the Serialized label on the back of my boards have a date of 12/16/2020. Are yours more recently built than that? If it happens that Digikey is carrying older versions of the boards that don’t have pre-loaded Linux I feel like Octavo should have Digikey purge old stock or put a note in their startup guide so that others don’t end up with the same confusion.

[coloradocarlos]

We have 2 RED boards and the one I just examined shows 12/16/2020. I’ll check the other later but I am pretty it should be the same because they arrived at the same time. If not I will post a correction.

[JensOnOctavo]

Thanks! Not really sure what is going on. Perhaps someone from Octavo can reply here tomorrow. My Firmware teammate just finished loading the SD card image and the board seems to boot fine from the SD card.

[coloradocarlos]

If you can boot from the SD card, see if there is anything on the eMMC by examining the filesystem there (fdisk, mount, etc.). I don’t have a RED in front of me but I have some written notes. /dev/mmcblk2 should have 4 partitions (uBoot, /boot, /vendor, and /). /dev/mmcblk1 is the SD card.

[Manuel Malagon]

Mine behaved the exact same way you describe and I got it like a month ago. I plugged it in and nothing happened.

I didn’t worry much and I just created the eMMC image with the instructions from the OSD32MP1 Debian SDK and flashed it with STM32CubeProgrammer and now it works like a charm.

[Neeraj Dantu]

JenOnOctavo,

Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We are investigating the matter of un-flashed OSD32MP1-RED boards. For the boards that you have for development, we are making our flasher card available on the web here: https://octavosystems.com/files/osd32mp1-red-flash-image/.

The procedure to flash the eMMC on OSD32MP1-RED is given below:

1. Extract the flasher image from the above link

2. Program the flasher image into an SD card (32GB – Image is 16GB) using either Etcher(https://www.balena.io/etcher/) or Win32DiskImager(https://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/) software. On Linux, you can use ‘dd’

3. Put the board in SD boot mode (101b — 2 switched on either side away from the board, middle switch towards the board)

4. Insert the SD card you flashed with the flasher image into the board’s SD card slot

5. Power the board up and wait ~15 min. The board should indicate booting and function with HRTBT LED showing a heart beat pattern

6. Once the board is flashed, USRLED(below PWR LED) will turn ON. This indicates that the board flash is complete

7. To verify board flash, put the board into eMMC boot mode(010b — 2 switches on either side towards the board, middle switch away from the board) and power the board up. The board should boot without any SD card.

UPDATE: After investigation, we found that there is an issue with the flasher image programming the FSBL partition of OSD32MP1-RED. In order to rectify the issue, please follow the directions below:

Requirements: Host PC with Cube Programmer, USB-C cable and OSD32MP1-RED

Download the files required for flashing OSD32MP1-RED here: https://octavosystems.com/octavosystems.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/osd32mp1-red-emmc-deploy.tar.xz

On a Host Ubuntu PC:

– tar xvf osd32mp1-red-emmc-deploy.tar.xz

Set the boot mode on OSD32MP1-RED to USB/Serial (0b000)

Connect the board to the host PC using the USB-C cable

Verify that the board is connected to the PC in update mode:

– STM32_Programmer_CLI -l USB

The output of this command should indicate the USB port the board is connected to.

Now Flash the board’s TF-A partition using the following command:

– STM32_Programmer_CLI -c port=USB1 -w Flashlayout_emmc_osd32mp1-red-trusted-tfa.tsv

After the board is programmed(Should take <10 sec), set the boot mode to eMMC(0b010) and power up the board.

Best,

Neeraj

 

• This reply was modified 2 years, 7 months ago by Neeraj Dantu.

[JensOnOctavo]

Thanks Neeraj! Awesome support on these forums. I was able to generate the file to flash the boards using the SDK, just got them all programmed. One board had a weird issue that it wouldn’t program unless I also had the UART plugged in, but that was likely a hardware issue as I had modified that board for testing power consumption. And thanks for posting the flash image file, that will be useful in the future.

Best,
Jens

[PatAdamo]

A quick clarification to the strikeout replaced above:
1) The command to check to see if your board iso connected: STM32_Programmer_CLI -l USB. The font displayed does not make it clear that the dash option is dash ELL, lower case ell.
2) There is a typo in the command to flash the board using the CLI – the file name is capital EFF and Capital ELL: FlashLayout_emmc_osd32mp1-red-trusted-tfa.tsv

With the clarification of (1) and the correction of (2), this works where the uSDCard image that was supposed to program the EMMC did not work.

It was also disappointing that the edit of the post DID NOT update the timestamp of the post, so it did not come up as a new entry, causing at least me to believe that there was no change to this problem, when in fact, there was a correction.

[Author]

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