i.MX53 (Re: Wandboard support?)

[Douglas Beattie]

Speaking of i.MX targets...

I have 2 different flavors of i.MX53-based development systems;
the i.MX53 Low-cost ("LoCo") board, and actually two complete
ConnectCore for i.MX53 JumpStart Kit for Android from Digi (which
are fairly high-end kits, retailing for about $500).

In fact, I have been waiting for any word on renewed interest or
momentum for the i.MX5/6 series. If someone is seriously interested
in attempting a port, I would consider sending them one of my i.MX53
ConnectCore kits, which is still unopened, in support of their efforts.
This kit is a good platform for porting, since it has just about every possible
peripheral available, including LCD, HDMI, WLAN, and even an SATA
drive interface.

A few months ago, I dived in deep, looking at some of the NetBSD port
code as well, but an ARM port of FreeBSD is still a little over my head.
While I have done tons of embedded development over the past 15 years,
this looks tough to do alone, or without prior FreeBSD/ARM driver experience.

Information on the boards I have are found at these links;
  http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=IMX53QSB
  http://www.digi.com/products/model?mid=4124

The i.MX5/6 are some nice ARM controllers -- I see some decent kits and
modules in several places;
  http://devicesolutions.net/Products/OpaliMX53DevelopmentKit.aspx
  http://boundarydevices.com/products/nitrogen53-board-imx53-arm-cortex-a8-sbc/
  http://www.embedinfo.com/english/product/sabrelite.asp
  http://www.variscite.com/products/system-on-module-som/cortex-a9/var-som-mx6-cpu-freescale-imx6

Anyway, one interesting thing I noticed about the i.MX53 (and I suppose other
family members of i.MX series) was the boot loader, which is basically a ROM-
based BIOS boot loader, already built in, which can boot from several different
peripheral sources, and which can take certain peripheral configuration instructions
from a properly-structured table in the load record.

Maybe it's not too far over my head, if there were some collaboration, assuming
hardware available (which it is).

--
Douglas Beattie
http://www.linkedin.com/in/beattidp



On Jul 28, 2013, at 8:31 PM, Ian Lepore wrote:

> On Wed, 2013-07-24 at 22:17 +0200, Bernd Walter wrote:
>> I just received a dual core Wandboard (www.wandboard.org) in the
>> believe it is supported.
>> There is also a reference about rw_lock panic in april, which sounded
>> like someone got it running in the end.
>> But I can't find anything else, also no kernelconfig.
>> 
> 
> Damjan Marion and I both started working on wandboard bringup a few
> months ago (independently) and then we both set it aside after having a
> little success.  Now there's interest in it at work again so I resumed
> my efforts this weekend.  Right now I've got it booting to the point of
> mountroot, but I don't have any working drivers that can be a root
> device, so that's a pretty small success.  (I've got the single-core
> board right now, I think we'll be using dual core at work.)
> 
> Hopefully I can get usb working in the next couple days (the controller
> is almost the same as the imx51 we already support).  It looks like
> we'll need an ethernet driver written from scratch, likewise mmc/sd.
> 
> -- Ian
> 
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