Linux Flashing for Freescale i.MX6

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

Build Gear version 0.9.19beta released!

A new version of Build Gear has recently been released.

Build Gear is the open source build tool that is used to build the Ixonos Embedded Linux BSP for various embedded boards based on a range of different chipsets including TI OMAP/AM/DM, Freescale IMX, Intel Atom/Haswell, etc.. This build tool allows us to very effectively create and maintain clean cut modern Linux BSP firmware tailored to fulfil the requirements of individual embedded customers.

This release includes a couple of new features and some bug fixes.

One of the new interesting features is the introduction of a new command to create a software manifest which provides a detailed list of the software components involved in a particular build. This is a quite useful feature in case you need an overview of the licenses of the components going into your firmware. Actually, for most this is an important feature so that the BSP firmware can be legally approved before going to production.

For more details see the release announcement here

The Build Gear tool has been in beta stage for quite some time but it has now stabilized to the point where it is ready to move out of beta. Thus, it will soon be labelled stable and a 1.0 release will mark the final transition out of beta.

Expect more posts from me on this build tool and on how and why we use it to create the Ixonos Embedded Linux BSP platform solution.

Keep it simple!