We often have customer and R&D projects where we build embedded SW solutions on the Freescale i.MX6 platform. As our OS of choice usually is Linux, developing those solutions has been a bit problematic since Freescale's own tool for flashing (MFGTool) is only available for Windows. Our developers finally got bored of having a separate Windows -workstation for flashing the stuff they had developed on Linux. Therefore they decided to create a Linux tool for flashing to speed up the
development process.
The result of this work was a tool called utp_com which can be used with
imx_usb to flash i.MX6 based hardware from Linux environment. As we are talking about Linux we also decided to make the tool publicly available.
Development started from point where we were able to flash "flashing OS" into the device with imx_usb tool. After this a SD card device (/dev/sd* ) is available from the target device to the host machine via an USB connection. The SD card device is not a conventional one, but communication is done with the SCSI commands. On top of them Freescale has defined an Update Transport Protocol ( UTP ) which is used for communication. UTP message data is sent in the vendor specific CDB field of the SCSI message. Return values come as part of the SCSI sense data.
Example commands how a file is copied to the target device and then written to a flash device below:
utp_com -d /dev/sdb -c "send" -f u-boot.bin
utp_com -d /dev/sdb -c "$ dd if=\$FILE of=/dev/mtd0 bs=512"
Code is under GNU GPL v2.0 license, and can be found from:
http://github.com/ixonos/utp_com.
We hope you find it as useful as we do!
Teemu Piiroinen, SW Specialist, Ixonos Plc
