Yocto: using U-Boot as bootloader with a RaspberryPi Zero

2018-10-28

Gianluca Pacchiella

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This post is a work in progress, so if you find it incomplete and not readable probably it's not finished yet. I prefer to publish a little before than leave a post to rust in my drafts.

This is a guide about building and configuring a Yocto build for a raspberry pi zero with u-boot.

Yocto and Repo

You can obtain an out-of-the-box configured Yocto tree using a manifest in the following way

$ mkdir rpi-yocto && cd rpi-yocto
$ repo init -u https://github.com/gipi/rpi0-repo -b sumo
$ repo sync
$ source sources/oe-init-build-env build/
$ bitbake rpi-basic-image
$ sudo dd if=tmp/deploy/images/raspberrypi0/rpi-basic-image-raspberrypi0.rpi-sdimg of=/dev/sdd
$ bitbake rpi-basic-image -c populate_sdk

This way of configuring a project composed of multiple git repositories is inspired of the way Android works: there is manifest (i.e. a simple XML file) containing the description of the repository with the specific revision and path that is needed to checkout in order to have a correctly configured project. In my case I created a manifest with the minimal layers in order to boot up a raspberry pi zero with U-Boot and configured to enable the debugging via JTAG.

In the rest of the post I try to summarize how this is done.

U-Boot

U-Boot is a bootloader, i.e. a program that is used to setup the essential peripherals (like RAM and flash) and to load the intended kernel with the correct parameters.

In order to use it with meta-raspberry you need only to set in local.conf the following

RPI_USE_U_BOOT = "1"

Since I want to save the manual procedure for future use, what follows is the explanation for the configuration, if you use the layer indicated above all this is unecessary.

Boot sequence

The raspberry pi, in particular the Broadcom chip, follows this sequence to bootup

stage 1: is the on-chip ROM, loads stage2 in the L2 cache
stage 2: is bootcode.bin. Enable SDRAM and loads stage 3
stage 3: is loader.bin. It loads start.elf
start.elf loads kernel.img

kernel.img is usually the linux kernel, we want to substitute it with u-boot. This is achievable renaming accordingly the file or changing the right variable (named kernel) in the config.txt file. cmdline.txt instead contains the arguments for the kernel.

cmdline.txt

dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=serial0,115200 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootfstype=ext4 rootwait console=tty0

The complicated thing that happens with this device is that the start.elf prepare already the fdt (flat device tree) at a specific address and doesn't need to be loaded from the SD card. The address is passed as environment variable in u-boot.

Take in mind that some document uses fdt_addr_r instead of the mainline's fdt_addr.

Configuration

If you don't have already u-boot compiled you can use Yocto via these variables

PREFERRED_PROVIDER_virtual/bootloader = "u-boot"

KERNEL_IMAGETYPE = "zImage"
KERNEL_BOOTCMD = "bootz"

The command to boot are indicated in

boot.cmd that is obtained compiling boot.scr

fdt addr ${fdt_addr} && fdt get value bootargs /chosen bootargs
fatload mmc 0:1 ${kernel_addr_r} zImage
bootz ${kernel_addr_r} - ${fdt_addr}

GPIOs

For future use I want to set the pins needed to use JTAG with the board.

The chip of the raspberry pi has 54 pins configurable via 41 32-bit registers; the start address is different between board models, for a pi zero is 0x7e200000 but to use it directly to modify the registers is a pain in the ass.

There are several options to go with to set the desired pins, each one needs (but the first one) a recent version of the firmware (you can see the version of your system using vcgencmd version)

create a device driver and move the pins using it
dt-blob.bin
config.txt and its gpio variable

The simplest way (with a modern firmware) is to use the last option: in my case I can add directly in the config.txt the following lines

gpio=22-27=a4

or using the layer meta-raspberrypi you can set it via the RPI_EXTRA_CONFIG variable in your local.conf.

In order to check if all is ok you can use the wiringpi library and in particular the gpio program in the running system:

root@raspberrypi0:~# gpio readall
 +-----+-----+---------+------+---+-Pi Zero--+---+------+---------+-----+-----+
 | BCM | wPi |   Name  | Mode | V | Physical | V | Mode | Name    | wPi | BCM |
 +-----+-----+---------+------+---+----++----+---+------+---------+-----+-----+
 |     |     |    3.3v |      |   |  1 || 2  |   |      | 5v      |     |     |
 |   2 |   8 |   SDA.1 |   IN | 1 |  3 || 4  |   |      | 5v      |     |     |
 |   3 |   9 |   SCL.1 |   IN | 1 |  5 || 6  |   |      | 0v      |     |     |
 |   4 |   7 | GPIO. 7 |   IN | 1 |  7 || 8  | 1 | ALT0 | TxD     | 15  | 14  |
 |     |     |      0v |      |   |  9 || 10 | 1 | ALT0 | RxD     | 16  | 15  |
 |  17 |   0 | GPIO. 0 |   IN | 0 | 11 || 12 | 0 | IN   | GPIO. 1 | 1   | 18  |
 |  27 |   2 | GPIO. 2 | ALT4 | 0 | 13 || 14 |   |      | 0v      |     |     |
 |  22 |   3 | GPIO. 3 |   IN | 0 | 15 || 16 | 0 | IN   | GPIO. 4 | 4   | 23  |
 |     |     |    3.3v |      |   | 17 || 18 | 0 | ALT4 | GPIO. 5 | 5   | 24  |
 |  10 |  12 |    MOSI |   IN | 0 | 19 || 20 |   |      | 0v      |     |     |
 |   9 |  13 |    MISO |   IN | 0 | 21 || 22 | 0 | ALT4 | GPIO. 6 | 6   | 25  |
 |  11 |  14 |    SCLK |   IN | 0 | 23 || 24 | 1 | IN   | CE0     | 10  | 8   |
 |     |     |      0v |      |   | 25 || 26 | 1 | IN   | CE1     | 11  | 7   |
 |   0 |  30 |   SDA.0 |   IN | 1 | 27 || 28 | 1 | IN   | SCL.0   | 31  | 1   |
 |   5 |  21 | GPIO.21 |   IN | 1 | 29 || 30 |   |      | 0v      |     |     |
 |   6 |  22 | GPIO.22 |   IN | 1 | 31 || 32 | 0 | IN   | GPIO.26 | 26  | 12  |
 |  13 |  23 | GPIO.23 |   IN | 0 | 33 || 34 |   |      | 0v      |     |     |
 |  19 |  24 | GPIO.24 |   IN | 0 | 35 || 36 | 0 | IN   | GPIO.27 | 27  | 16  |
 |  26 |  25 | GPIO.25 | ALT4 | 0 | 37 || 38 | 0 | IN   | GPIO.28 | 28  | 20  |
 |     |     |      0v |      |   | 39 || 40 | 0 | IN   | GPIO.29 | 29  | 21  |
 +-----+-----+---------+------+---+----++----+---+------+---------+-----+-----+
 | BCM | wPi |   Name  | Mode | V | Physical | V | Mode | Name    | wPi | BCM |
 +-----+-----+---------+------+---+-Pi Zero--+---+------+---------+-----+-----+

How you can see the configuration is correct.

Yocto and Repo

U-Boot

Boot sequence

Configuration

GPIOs

Links

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