Tomorrow, on May 18, the third edition of Live Embedded Event will take place. Live Embedded Event is a free and fully online conference, dedicated to embedded topics at large. One can register directly online to receive a link to attend the conference.
Bootlin will be participating to this third edition, with 3 talks from 3 different Bootlin engineers:
Michael Opdenacker on LLVM tools for the Linux kernel, at 12:00 UTC+2 in Track 3. Details: Recent versions of Linux can be compiled with LLVM’s Clang C language compiler, in addition to Gcc, at least on today’s most popular CPU architectures. This presentation will show you how. Cross-compiling works differently with Clang: no architecture-specific cross-compiling toolchain is required. We will compare the Clang and Gcc compiled kernels, in terms of size and boot time. More generally, we will discuss the concrete benefits brought by being able to compile the kernel with this alternative compiler, in particular the LLVM specific kernel Makefile targets: clang-tidy and clang-analyzer.
Grégory Clement on AMP on Cortex A9 with Linux and OpenAMP, at 15:30 UTC+2 in Track 2. Details: While, usually, the Cortex A9 cores are used in SMP, one could want use one of the core to run an other OS. In this case the system becomes AMP. Typically, it allows running a dedicated real time OS on a core. This presentation will show the step that allow having this support using open sources stacks. First we will see what OpenAMP is, then how the Linux kernel can communicate with external OS using remote proc message, and finally what to adapt in the Linux kernel and OpenAMP in order to support the usage of a Cortex A9. This was experimented on an i.MX6 but the solution presented has the advantage to be easily adapted on any SoC using Cortex A9.
Thomas Perrot on PKCS#11 with OP-TEE at 15:00 UTC+2 in Track 2. Details:
PKCS#11 is a standard API that allows to manage cryptographic tokens, regardless of the platform such as Hardware Security Modules, Trusted Plaform Modules or smart cards. Moreover, modern processors offer a secure area, named Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) that allows the isolation of some operations, datas and devices to guarantee their integrity and confidentiality. OP-TEE is an open source implementation of Trusted Execution Environment that runs in parallel with the operating system, as a companion. In this talk, we will first introduce PKCS#11, then OP-TEE, and finally look at how PKCS#11 operations can be performed through OP-TEE, and what are the benefits. Our presentation will be illustrated with examples based on the NXP i.MX8QXP platform, but should be applicable to other platforms that have OP-TEE support.
Join us at Live Embedded Event, and discover our talks as well as the many other talks from other speakers!
In addition, both Thomas and Alexandre will be speaking at the event:
Thomas Petazzoni will give a talk Buildroot: what’s new?, providing an update on the improvements and new features in the Buildroot build system that have been integrated over the past two years
Alexandre Belloni will give a talk Yocto Project Autobuilders and the SWAT Team, during which he will explain what’s happening behind in the scenes in the Yocto Project to review and validate contributions before they are integrated.
Thomas and Alexandre will also naturally be available during the event to discuss business or career opportunities, so do not hesitate to get in touch if you’re interested.
Finally, prior to the event, Thomas Petazzoni will be in the Bay Area on June 13-15, also available for meetings or discussions.
As we mentioned in our last blog post about OP-TEE 3.16, Bootlin planned to and contributed some interesting features in the recently released OP-TEE 3.17 ! Here is a short presentation of our contributions to this release:
Summary
During this release cycle, Bootlin contributed the following features:
Watchdog support
Generic watchdog API
OP-TEE Watchdog service compatible with arm,smc-wdt Linux driver
As part of our work on Microchip SAMA5D2 support in OP-TEE, we wanted to have support for the SAMA5D2 watchdog. Doing so without exposing the watchdog to Linux would have been useless and thus, we implemented and contributed a new generic watchdog API to OP-TEE. This interface allows registering a watchdog against the system and exposing it to Linux through a specific SMC handler that interfaces with the Linux arm,smc-wdt compatible driver (see drivers/watchdog/arm_smc_wdt.c in the Linux kernel code). Our generic watchdog API is obviously used by the new watchdog driver for Microchip SAMA5D2, but was also quickly leveraged by ST who contributed a new watchdog driver for stm32mp1 based on this new watchdog API.
RTC
On Microchip SAMA5D2, the RTC is part of the system controller which needs to be secured since it contains critical features. Once in the secure world, the RTC is not available to the normal world. In order to expose this RTC device to the normal world (and particularly for Linux RTC subsystem), a new Pseudo Trusted Application (PTA) was added. This PTA communicates with a Linux OP-TEE compatible RTC driver and allows to get/set the date and time. This driver is generic and will allow any vendor which adds RTC support to OP-TEE to expose it transparently to Linux.
Contribution details
A total of 29 commits were contributed for OP-TEE 3.17:
Do not hesitate to contact us if you need help and support to integrate or deploy OP-TEE on your platform, either Microchip platforms, but also other ARM32 or ARM64 platforms.
Most of the BeagleBone boards from BeagleBoard.org share the same form factor, have the same headers and therefore can accept the same extension boards, also known as capes in the BeagleBoard world.
Of course, a careful PCB design was necessary to make this possible.
This must have been relatively easy with the early models (BeagleBone Black, Black Wireless, Green, Green Wireless, Black Industrial and Enhanced) which are based on the same Sitara AM3358 System on Chip (SoC) from Texas Instruments. However, the more recent creation of the BeagleBone AI board and keeping compatibility with existing capes must have been a little more complicated, as this board is based on a completely different SoC from Texas Instruments, the Sitara AM5729.
BeagleBone AI BeagleBone Green BeagleBone Black
Once the PCB design challenge was completed, the BeagleBoard.org crew set itself another challenge: implement software that supports each BeagleBone cape in the same way, whatever the board, in particular:
To have unique identifiers for devices in Linux, so that there is a stable name for Linux devices, even if at the hardware level they are connected differently, depending on whether the base board has a Sitara AM3358 and Sitara AM5729 SoC.
To have DT overlays for capes that are applicable to all base boards, even if peripherals are connected to different buses of the SoCs.
This article will explore the software solutions implemented by BeagleBoard.org. Their ideas can of course be reused by other projects with similar needs.
The need for a cape standard
A good summary can be found on Deepak Khatri’s Google Summer of Code 2020 page:
The idea of this project was to make the same user space examples work with both BeagleBone Black and BeagleBone AI, using the same references to drivers for peripherals assigned to the same pins between BeagleBone Black and BeagleBone AI. Also, Same DT overlays should work (whenever possible) for both BBB and BBAI, with updated U-Boot cape manager DT overlays will be automatically loaded during boot.
Software setup
The below instructions are for people owning the BeagleBone AI board and any other BeagleBone board, and interested in exploring the devices on their boards by themselves.
Uncompress each image, insert a micro-SD card in the card read in your PC, and then flash the corresponding card. Here are example commands, assuming that the micro-SD card is represented by the /dev/mmcblk0 device:
Connect the serial line of each board to your computer and then boot each board with it:
For BeagleBone AI: its sufficient to have the micro-SD card inserted.
On other BeagleBone boards, you may need to hold a button when you power up the board, to make it boot from the micro-SD card instead of from the internal eMMC. On the BeagleBone Black boards, for examples, that’s the USER button next to the USB host port. Note that you won’t need to do this again when you reset the board. The board will continue to boot from the external micro-SD card until it’s powered off.
You can connect with the default user, or connect as user root with password root.
Then, connect each board to the Internet, and get the latest package updates:
sudo apt update
sudo apt dist-upgrade
It’s then time to upgrade the kernel to the latest version supported by BeagleBoard. To do so, you’ll have to manually update the /opt/scripts/tools/update_kernel.sh file. In this file, go to the # parse commandline options section and add the below lines:
--lts-5_10-kernel|--lts-5_10)
kernel="LTS510"
;;
You can can then upgrade to the latest 5.10 kernel:
Note that on the BeagleBone Black, I2C1 and I2C2 are available at two different locations.
So, for both types of boards, we have at least I2C buses on P9_17/18, P9_19/20 and P9_24/26. However, that’s complicated because these pins don’t correspond to the same I2C buses. Therefore, users have to know that P9_19/20 correspond to I2C2 on BeagleBone Black and to I2C4 on BeagleBone AI.
The devices in /dev/ reflect such differences.
Here’s what we have on the BeagleBone AI:
root@beaglebone:~# ls -la /dev/i2c-*
crw------- 1 root root 89, 0 Mar 23 15:00 /dev/i2c-0
crw------- 1 root root 89, 3 Mar 23 15:00 /dev/i2c-3
Note that here with the AM5729 SoC, the first I2C bus is I2C1. Hence, /dev/i2c-0 corresponds to I2C1 (which is another I2C bus available on the SoC but not available through the cape headers) and /dev/i2c-3 corresponds to I2C4. Also note that I2C5 is not exposed in the default configuration that we have here, most probably because the corresponding header pins are used for other purposes.
And now let’s look at what we have on the BeagleBone Black:
root@beaglebone:~# ls -la /dev/i2c-*
crw------- 1 root root 89, 0 Mar 23 16:16 /dev/i2c-0
crw------- 1 root root 89, 1 Mar 23 16:17 /dev/i2c-1
crw------- 1 root root 89, 2 Mar 23 16:17 /dev/i2c-2
Here with the AM3358 SoC, /dev/i2c-0 corresponds to I2C0, /dev/ic2-1 to I2C1 and /dev/ic2-2 to I2C2.
So, on a running system, how to know which I2C bus device corresponds to the P9_19/20 header pins?
You can see that both devices, though they correspond to different devices, share the same symlink property, which is used to create a symbolic link in /dev/bone/i2c/ to the actual bus device file.
Let’s see such symbolic links on the BeagleBone AI:
root@beaglebone:~# ls -la /dev/bone/i2c/
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 80 Jan 1 2000 .
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 80 Jan 1 2000 ..
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 11 Mar 23 15:00 0 -> ../../i2c-0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 11 Mar 23 15:00 2 -> ../../i2c-3
And on the BeagleBone Black:
root@beaglebone:~# ls -la /dev/bone/i2c/
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 100 Mar 23 16:16 .
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 100 Mar 23 16:16 ..
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 11 Mar 23 16:16 0 -> ../../i2c-0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 11 Mar 23 16:17 1 -> ../../i2c-1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 11 Mar 23 16:17 2 -> ../../i2c-2
You can see that at least /dev/bone/i2c/0 and /dev/bone/i2c/2 are shared between both types of boards. Userspace code examples can then support different boards by referring to such device file links, for example by using the I2C tools commands.
The symbolic links are created from the Device Tree sources not by the Linux kernel, but by the udev device manager, thanks to the following rule found in /etc/udev/rules.d/10-of-symlink.rules in the BeagleBoard Debian distribution:
# allow declaring a symlink for a device in DT
ATTR{device/of_node/symlink}!="", \
ENV{OF_SYMLINK}="%s{device/of_node/symlink}"
ENV{OF_SYMLINK}!="", ENV{DEVNAME}!="", \
SYMLINK+="%E{OF_SYMLINK}", \
TAG+="systemd", ENV{SYSTEMD_ALIAS}+="/dev/%E{OF_SYMLINK}"
Accessing other devices
Other devices are available in the same way through symbolic links in /dev/bone/, for example UART (serial port) devices.
Let’s check on the BeagleBone AI (run sudo apt install tree first):
Another challenge is with userspace software examples directly refer to header pins by their names. Here is a BoneScript push button demo, for example:
var b = require('bonescript');
b.pinMode('P8_19', b.INPUT);
b.pinMode('P8_13', b.OUTPUT);
setInterval(check,100);
function check(){
b.digitalRead('P8_19', checkButton);
}
function checkButton(x) {
if(x.value == 1){
b.digitalWrite('P8_13', b.HIGH);
}
else{
b.digitalWrite('P8_13', b.LOW);
}
}
For AM3358 BeagleBone boards, the am335x-bone-common-univ.dtsi file already associates the P8_19 name to a specific GPIO:
However, this driver is specific to the BeagleBoard.org kernel, and the Device Tree for Beagle Bone AI doesn’t use it yet, so this aspect is still work in progress. The main goal remains though: define generic names for header pins, which map to specific GPIOs on different boards.
The goal as stated in the beginning is to use the same Device Tree overlays on both types of SoCs. While as of today it doesn’t seem possible to generate compiled Device Tree Overlays (DTBO) which would support both SoCs at the same time, the BeagleBoard.org engineers have come up with a solution to achieve this at source level. This means that, for each cape to support, the Device Tree Overlay binaries for the supported SoCs can be produced from a unique source file.
While this hasn’t been deployed yet in the 5.10 BeagleBoard kernel, such source code is already available in Deepak Khatri’s own tree.
/*
* Copyright (C) 2020 Deepak Khatri
*
* Virtual cape for /dev/bone/can/1
*
* This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
* it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 as
* published by the Free Software Foundation.
*/
/dts-v1/;
/plugin/;
/*
* Helper to show loaded overlays under: /proc/device-tree/chosen/overlays/
*/
&{/chosen} {
overlays {
BONE-CAN1 = __TIMESTAMP__;
};
};
/*
* Update the default pinmux of the pins.
* See these files for the phandles (&P9_* & &P8_*)
* https://github.com/lorforlinux/BeagleBoard-DeviceTrees/blob/compatibility/src/arm/am335x-bone-common-univ.dtsi
* https://github.com/lorforlinux/BeagleBoard-DeviceTrees/blob/compatibility/src/arm/am572x-bone-common-univ.dtsi
*/
&ocp {
P9_24_pinmux { pinctrl-0 = <&P9_24_can_pin>;}; /* can rx */
P9_26_pinmux { pinctrl-0 = <&P9_26_can_pin>;}; /* can tx */
};
/*
* See these files for the phandles (&bone_*) and other bone bus nodes
* https://github.com/lorforlinux/BeagleBoard-DeviceTrees/blob/compatibility/src/arm/bbai-bone-buses.dtsi
* https://github.com/lorforlinux/BeagleBoard-DeviceTrees/blob/compatibility/src/arm/bbb-bone-buses.dtsi
*/
&bone_can_1 {
status = "okay";
};
The &ocp code applies the pin muxing definitions for CAN on P9_24 (&P9_24_can_pin) and P9_26 (&P9_26_can_pin), which of course are different on AM3358 and AM5729.
By adding a symlink property to the Device Tree sources, BeagleBoard.org has made it possible to make userspace code, in particular its code examples, support all the BeagleBone boards at the same time, even though the devices they drive have are numbered differently on different SoCs.
Such a technique may be reused by other projects interested in running the same software on boards based on different SoCs.
As far as GPIOs are concerned, the drivers/gpio/gpio-of-helper.c driver is specific to the BeagleBoard.org kernel and is unlikely to be accepted in the mainline kernel in its current state. However, there are other solutions, supported by the mainline kernel, to associate names to GPIOs and then to look up such GPIOs by name through libgpiod.
Last but not least, it’s possible to use the same Device Tree Overlay source code to support an extension board on similar boards, just by using common definitions having different values on each different platform. Any project can reuse this idea, which just uses standard Device Tree syntax.
Bootlin thanks BeagleBoard.org for funding the creation of this blog post. Note that another post is coming in the next weeks, about the extension board manager we added to U-Boot thanks to funding from BeagleBoard.org.
Linux 5.17 has been released last Sunday. As usual, the best coverage of what is part of this release comes from LWN (part 1 and part 2), as well as KernelNewbies (unresponsive at the time of this writing) or CNX Software (for an ARM/RISC-V/MIPS focused description).
Bootlin contributed just 34 patches to this release, which isn’t a lot by the number of patches, but in fact includes a number of important new features. Also, we have many more contributions being discussed on the mailing lists or in preparation. For this 5.17 release here are the highlights of our contributions:
Alexandre Belloni, as the maintainer of the RTC subsystem, contributed one improvement to an RTC driver
Clément Léger improved the Microchip Ocelot Ethernet switch driver performance by implementing FDMA support. This allows network packets that are going from the switch to the CPU, or from the CPU to the switch to be received/sent in a much more efficient fashion than before. The Microchip Ocelot Ethernet switch driver was developed and upstreamed several years ago by Bootlin, see our previous blog post.
Clément Léger also contributed smaller fixes: a bug fix in the core software node code, and one PHY driver fix.
Hervé Codina implemented support for GPIO interrupts on the old ST Spear320 platform.
Miquèl Raynal contributed a brand new NAND controller driver, for the NAND controller found in the Renesas RZ/N1 SoC. We expect to contribute to many more aspects of the Renesas RZ/N1 Linux kernel support in the next few months.
Miquèl Raynal contributed a few Device Tree changes enabling the ADC on the Texas Instruments AM473x platform, after contributing the driver changes a few releases ago.
Miquèl Raynal started contributing some improvements to the 802.15.4 Linux kernel stack, and we also have many more changes in the pipe for this Linux kernel subsystem.
Thomas Perrot added support for the Sierra EM919X modem to the existing MHI PCI driver.
Tomorrow, on May 18, the third edition of Live Embedded Event will take place. Live Embedded Event is a free and fully online conference, dedicated to embedded topics at large. One can register directly online to receive a link to attend the conference.
