Bootlin topics at Linux Plumbers conference in Vienna, Sep 18-20

Linux Plumbers conference 2024Next week is going to be a busy week in Vienna, with the Open Source Summit Europe followed by the Linux Plumbers conference. As we had already published in a previous blog post, Bootlin will have a very strong presence at those events: 13 Bootlin engineers will participate to the Open Source Summit and 2 will give talks, and 8 Bootlin engineers will participate to Linux Plumbers.

Regarding Linux Plumbers, we also proposed 3 discussion topics that got accepted:

  • Representing the front-facing ports of Ethernet interfaces, a discussion proposed by Bootlin engineer Maxime Chevallier. This is a topic that Maxime has been working on for quite some time, mainly as part of customer projects at Bootlin. The first step of this effort recently got merged in the Linux kernel, and the ethtool part is being reviewed, but what got merged is only the first step, and additional developments are needed and will be discussed at Plumbers.
  • Runtime hotplug on non-discoverable busses with device tree overlays, a discussion proposed by Bootlin engineers Luca Ceresoli and Hervé Codina. Both Luca and Hervé have been working over the past year or so on projects that involve using Device Tree overlays. Luca on a project where a part of the hardware, with non-discoverable busses (I2C, DSI, etc.) is connected/disconnected at runtime, and Hervé on a project where a PCI device is a full SoC with numerous peripherals that already have drivers in the kernel. Several patch series have been proposed on the mailing lists already, and we hope this discussion at Plumbers will help move the topic forward.
  • Hotplug DRM pipeline components on non-discoverable video busses, a discussion proposed by Bootlin engineer Luca Ceresoli is also related to the previous project, but this discussion focuses on the DRM aspect. Indeed, one of the non-discoverable bus that gets connected/disconnected in our use-case is DSI, so we need to make it hotpluggable, which isn’t supported by Linux currently. We made some proposals on the mailing lists on this topic, and discussion is on-going. We hope a face to face discussion at Plumbers can help moving this other topic forward.

Meet us next week in Vienna, either at the Open Source Summit and/or at Linux Plumbers!

Device Tree phandle: the C code point of view

Introduction

In this blog post, we’ll discuss the phandle properties used in Device Tree. These properties are used to describe a relationship between components described in the Device Tree. Many blog posts describe this property from the Device Tree source point of view (you can for example have a look at https://elinux.org/Device_Tree_Mysteries#Phandle for details related to Device Tree source). In this blog post, we want to take a different approach, and discuss how to handle this type of property from the Linux kernel C code point of view.

Continue reading “Device Tree phandle: the C code point of view”

Slides and videos of Bootlin talks at Live Embedded Event #2

The second edition of Live Embedded Event took place on June 3rd, exactly 6 months after the first edition. Even though there were a few issues with the online platform, it was once again great to learn new things about embedded, and share some of the work we’ve been doing at Bootlin on various topics. For the next edition, we plan to switch to a different online platform, hopefully providing a better experience.

But in the mean time, all videos of the event have been posted on the Youtube Channel of the event. The talks from Bootlin have been posted on Bootlin’s Youtube Channel.

Indeed, in addition to being part of the organization committee, Bootlin prepared and delivered 5 talks as part of Live Embedded Event, covering different topics we have worked on in the recent months for our customers.

Understanding U-Boot Falcon Mode and adding support for new boards, Michael Opdenacker

Slides [PDF]

Introduction to RAUC, Kamel Bouhara

Slides [PDF]

Security vulnerability tracking tools in Buildroot, Thomas Petazzoni

Slides [PDF]

Secure boot in embedded Linux systems, Thomas Perrot

Slides [PDF]

Device Tree overlays and U-boot extension board management, Köry Maincent

Slides [PDF]

Device Tree 101 webinar slides and videos

As we announced back in January, we have offered in partnership with ST on February 9 a free webinar titled Device Tree 101, which gives a detailed introduction to the Device Tree, an important mechanism used in the embedded Linux ecosystem to describe hardware platforms. We were happy to see the interest around this topic and webinar.

Bootlin has always shared freely and openly all its technical contents, including our training materials, and this webinar is no exception. We are therefore sharing the slides and video recording of both sessions of this webinar:

Thanks to everyone who participated and thanks to ST for the support in organizing this event! Do not hesitate to share and/or like our video, and to suggest us other topics that would be useful to cover in future webinars!

Enabling new hardware on Raspberry Pi with Device Tree Overlays

We recently had the chance to work on a customer project that involved the RaspberryPi Compute Module 3, with custom peripherals attached: a Microchip WILC1000 WiFi chip connected on SDIO, and a SGTL5000 audio codec connected over I2S/I2C. We take this opportunity to share some insights on how to introduce new hardware support on RaspberryPi platforms, by taking advantage of the Raspberry Pi specific Device Tree overlay mechanism.

Building and loading an upstream RPi Linux

Our customer is using the RaspberryPi OS Lite, which is a Debian-based system, coming with its pre-compiled Linux kernel image. However, for this project, we obviously need to customize the Linux kernel configuration, so we had to build our own kernel.

While Bootlin normally has a preference for using the upstream Linux kernel, for this project, we decided to keep using the Linux kernel fork provided by Raspberry Pi on Github, which is used by Raspberry Pi OS Lite. So we start our work by grabbing the Linux kernel source code from a the rpi-5.4.y provided by the Raspberry Pi Linux kernel repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux -b rpi-5.4.y

After installing an appropriate ARM 32-bit cross-compilation toolchain, we’re ready to configure and build the kernel:

$ make ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabihf- bcm2709_defconfig
$ make ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabihf- -j4 zImage

Thanks to the USB mass storage mode of the Raspberry Pi it is quite straightforward to update the kernel as it allows to mount the board eMMC partitions on the host system, and update whichever files we want. The tool that actually sets the RaspberryPi in this mode is called rpiboot.

After executing it, we deploy the zImage into the RaspberryPi /media/${USER}/boot/ partition and update the file /media/${USER}/boot/config.txt to set the firmware directive kernel=zImage.

That’s all it takes to replace the kernel image provided by the RaspberryPi OS Lite system by our own kernel, which means we are now ready to integrate our new features.

Device Tree Overlays

A specificity of the Raspberry Pi is that the boot flow starts from the GPU core and not the ARM core like it does on most embedded processors. The GPU load a first bootloader from a ROM that will load a second bootloader (bootcode.bin) from eMMC/SD card that is in charge of executing a firmware (start.elf). This GPU firmware finally reads and parses a file stored in the boot partition (config.txt), which is used to set various boot parameters such as the image to boot on.

This config.txt file also allows to indicate which Device Tree file should be used as the hardware description, as well as Device Tree Overlays that should be applied on top of the Device Tree files. Device Tree Overlays are a bit like patches for the Device Tree: they allow to extend the base Device Tree with new properties and nodes. They are typically used to describe the hardware attached to the RaspberryPi through expansion boards.

The Raspberry Pi kernel tree contains a number of such Device Tree Overlays in the arch/arm/boot/dts/overlays folder. Each of those overlays, stored in .dts file gets compiled into a .dtbo files. Those .dtbo can be loaded and applied to the main Device Tree by adding the following statement to the config.txt file:

dtoverlay=overlay-name,overlay-arguments

We will fully take advantage of this mechanism to introduce two new Device Tree Overlays that will be parsed and dynamically merged into the main Device Tree.

WILC1000 WiFi chip Device Tree overlay

The ATWILC1000 we want to support is a Microchip WiFi module. As of the Linux 5.4 kernel we are using for this project, the driver for this WiFi chip was still in the staging area of the Linux kernel, in drivers/staging/wilc1000, but it more recently graduated out of staging. We obviously started by enabling this driver in the kernel configuration, through its CONFIG_WILC1000 and CONFIG_WILC1000_SDIO options.

To describe the WILC1000 module in terms of Device Tree, we need to create a arch/arm/boot/dts/overlays/wilc1000-overlays.dts file, with the following contents:

/dts-v1/;
/plugin/;

/ {
    compatible = "brcm,bcm2835";

    fragment@0 {
        target = <&mmc>;
        wifi_ovl: __overlay__ {
            pinctrl-0 = <&sdio_ovl_pins &wilc_sdio_pins>;
            pinctrl-names = "default";
            non-removable;
            bus-width = <4>;
            status = "okay";
            #address-cells = <1>;
            #size-cells = <0>;

            wilc_sdio: wilc_sdio@0 {
                compatible = "microchip,wilc1000", "microchip,wilc3000";
                irq-gpios = <&gpio 1 0>;
                status = "okay";
                reg = <0>;
                bus-width = <4>;
            };
        };
    };

    fragment@1 {
        target = <&gpio>;
        __overlay__ {
            sdio_ovl_pins: sdio_ovl_pins {
                brcm,pins = <22 23 24 25 26 27>;
                brcm,function = <7>; /* ALT3 = SD1 */
                brcm,pull = <0 2 2 2 2 2>;
            };

            wilc_sdio_pins: wilc_sdio_pins {
                brcm,pins = <1>; /* CHIP-IRQ */
                brcm,function = <0>;
                brcm,pull = <2>;
            };
        };
    };
};

To be compiled, this overlay needs to be referenced in arch/arm/boot/dts/overlays/Makefile.

This overlay contains two fragments: fragment@0 and fragment@1. Each fragment will extend a Device Tree node of the main Device Tree, which is specified by the target property of each fragment: fragment@0 will extend the node referenced by the &mmc phandle, and fragment@1 will extend the node referenced by the &gpio phandle. The mmc and gpio labels are defined in the main Device Tree describing the system-on-chip, arch/arm/boot/dts/bcm283x.dtsi. Practically speaking, the first fragment enables the MMC controller, its pin-muxing, and describes the WiFi chip as a sub-node of the MMC controller. The second fragment describes the pin-muxing configurations used for the MMC controller.

Above, each fragment target, &mmc and &gpio is matching an existing device node in the underlying tree arch/arm/boot/dts/bcm283x.dtsi. Note that our hardware is designed such as the reset pin of the wilc is automatically de-assert when powering the board so we don’t define it here.

Now that we have our overlay we enable it through the firmware config.txt :

dtoverlay=sdio,poll_once=off
dtoverlay=wilc1000
gpio=38=op,dh

In addition to our own wilc1000 overlay, we are also loading the sdio overlay, with the poll_once=off argument to make sure we are polling our wilc device even after the boot is complete when the chip enable gpio is asserted through the firmware directive gpio=38=op,dh.

After copying the wilc1000.dtbo on our board we can verify that both overlays are getting merged in the main device-tree using the vcdbg command:

  pi@raspberrypi:~$ sudo vcdbg log msg
   002351.555: brfs: File read: /mfs/sd/config.txt
   002354.107: brfs: File read: 4322 bytes
   ...
   005603.860: dtdebug: Opened overlay file 'overlays/wilc1000.dtbo'
   005605.500: brfs: File read: /mfs/sd/overlays/wilc1000.dtbo
   005619.506: Loaded overlay 'sdio'
   005624.063: dtdebug: fragment 3 disabled
   005624.160: dtdebug: fragment 4 disabled
   005624.256: dtdebug: fragment 5 disabled
   005633.283: dtdebug: merge_fragment(/soc/mmcnr@7e300000,/fragment@0/__overlay__)
   005633.308: dtdebug:   +prop(status)
   005633.757: dtdebug: merge_fragment() end
   005642.521: dtdebug: merge_fragment(/soc/mmc@7e300000,/fragment@1/__overlay__)
   005642.549: dtdebug:   +prop(pinctrl-0)
   005643.003: dtdebug:   +prop(pinctrl-names)
   005643.443: dtdebug:   +prop(non-removable)
   005644.022: dtdebug:   +prop(bus-width)
   005644.477: dtdebug:   +prop(status)
   005644.935: dtdebug: merge_fragment() end
   005646.614: dtdebug: merge_fragment(/soc/gpio@7e200000,/fragment@2/__overlay__)
   005650.499: dtdebug: merge_fragment(/soc/gpio@7e200000/sdio_ovl_pins,/fragment@22
   /__overlay__/sdio_ovl_pins)
   ...

Of course there are lots of other useful tools that we used to debug, such as raspi-gpio and dtoverlay:

 pi@raspberrypi:~$ sudo raspi-gpio get
   BANK0 (GPIO 0 to 27):
   GPIO 0: level=1 fsel=0 func=INPUT
   GPIO 1: level=1 fsel=0 func=INPUT
   GPIO 2: level=1 fsel=0 func=INPUT
   ...
   GPIO 22: level=0 fsel=7 alt=3 func=SD1_CLK
   GPIO 23: level=1 fsel=7 alt=3 func=SD1_CMD
   GPIO 24: level=1 fsel=7 alt=3 func=SD1_DAT0
   GPIO 25: level=1 fsel=7 alt=3 func=SD1_DAT1
   GPIO 26: level=1 fsel=7 alt=3 func=SD1_DAT2
   GPIO 27: level=1 fsel=7 alt=3 func=SD1_DAT3

Here we can actually see that the correct pinmuxing configuration is set for the SDIO pins.

Testing WiFi on RaspberryPi OS

During our test we found that the wilc1000 seems to only support one mode at time which means only STA or soft-AP. The first mode is quite straightforward to test using the raspi-config tool, we just had have to supply our SSID name and password.

To know which modes are supported and if they are supported simultaneously use iw list:

   pi@raspberrypi:~$ iw list
   Wiphy phy0
           max # scan SSIDs: 10
           max scan IEs length: 1000 bytes
           max # sched scan SSIDs: 0
           max # match sets: 0
           max # scan plans: 1
           max scan plan interval: -1
           max scan plan iterations: 0
           Retry short limit: 7
           Retry long limit: 4
           Coverage class: 0 (up to 0m)
           Supported Ciphers:
                   * WEP40 (00-0f-ac:1)
                   * WEP104 (00-0f-ac:5)
                   * TKIP (00-0f-ac:2)
                   * CCMP-128 (00-0f-ac:4)
                   * CMAC (00-0f-ac:6)
           Available Antennas: TX 0x3 RX 0x3
           Supported interface modes:
                    * managed
                    * AP
                    * monitor
                    * P2P-client
                    * P2P-GO
            ...
        software interface modes (can always be added):
        interface combinations are not supported
        Device supports scan flush.
        Supported extended features:
 

To use the wilc1000 in soft-AP mode, one need to install additional packages in the RaspberryPi OS, such as hostapd and dnsmasq.

SGTL5000 audio codec Device Tree Overlay

After integrating support for the WILC1000 WiFi chip, we can now look at how we got the SGTL5000 audio codec to work. We wrote an overlay arch/arm/boot/dts/overlays/sgtl5000-overlay.dts with the following contents, and also edited arch/arm/boot/dts/overlays/Makefile to ensure it is built. Our sgtl5000-overlay.dts contains:

/dts-v1/;
/plugin/;

/{
    compatible = "brcm,bcm2835";

    fragment@0 {
        target-path = "/";
        __overlay__ {
            sgtl5000_mclk: sgtl5000_mclk {
                compatible = "fixed-clock";
                #clock-cells = <0>;
                clock-frequency = <12288000>;
                clock-output-names = "sgtl5000-mclk";
            };
        };
    };

    fragment@1 {
        target = <&soc>;
        __overlay__ {
            reg_1v8: reg_1v8@0 {
                compatible = "regulator-fixed";
                regulator-name = "1V8";
                regulator-min-microvolt = <1800000>;
                regulator-max-microvolt = <1800000>;
                regulator-always-on;
            };
        };
    };

    fragment@2 {
        target = <&i2c1>;
        __overlay__ {
            status = "okay";

            sgtl5000_codec: sgtl5000@0a {
                #sound-dai-cells = <0>;
                compatible = "fsl,sgtl5000";
                reg = <0x0a>;
                clocks = <&sgtl5000_mclk>;
                micbias-resistor-k-ohms = <2>;
                micbias-voltage-m-volts = <3000>;
                VDDA-supply = <&vdd_3v3_reg>;
                VDDIO-supply = <&vdd_3v3_reg>;
                VDDD-supply = <&reg_1v8>;
                status = "okay";
            };
        };
    };

    fragment@3 {
        target = <&i2s>;
        __overlay__ {
            status = "okay";
        };
    };

    fragment@4 {
        target = <&sound>;
        sound_overlay: __overlay__ {
           compatible = "simple-audio-card";
           simple-audio-card,format = "i2s";
           simple-audio-card,name = "sgtl5000";
           simple-audio-card,bitclock-master = <&dailink0_master>;
           simple-audio-card,frame-master = <&dailink0_master>;
           simple-audio-card,widgets =
               "Microphone", "Microphone Jack",
               "Speaker", "External Speaker";
           simple-audio-card,routing =
               "MIC_IN", "Mic Bias",
               "External Speaker", "LINE_OUT";
           status = "okay";
           simple-audio-card,cpu {
               sound-dai = <&i2s>;
           };
           dailink0_master: simple-audio-card,codec {
               sound-dai = <&sgtl5000_codec>;
           };
        };
    };
};

This is a much more complicated overlay, with a total of 5 fragments, which we will describe in detail:

  • fragment@0: this fragment adds a new Device Tree node that describes a clock that runs at a fixed frequency. Indeed, the sys_mclk clock of our codec is provided by an external oscillator running at 12.288 Mhz: this sgtl5000_mclk describes this external oscillator.
  • fragment@1: this fragment defines an external power supply used as the VDDD-supply of the sgtl5000 codec. Indeed, this codec is simply power by an always-on power supply at 1.8V. Don’t forget to enable both kernel options CONFIG_REGULATOR=y and CONFIG_REGULATOR_FIXED_VOLTAGE=y otherwise the driver will just silently fail to probe at boot.
  • fragment@2: this fragment describes the audio codec itself. The audio codec is described as a child of the I2C controller it is connected to: indeed the SGTL5000 uses I2C as its control interface.
  • fragment@3: this fragment simply enables the I2S interface. The CONFIG_SND_BCM2835_SOC_I2S=y kernel option must be enabled to have the corresponding driver.
  • fragment@4: this fragment describes the actual sound card. It uses the generic simple-audio-card driver, describes the two sides of the audio link: the CPU interface in the &i2s and the codec interface in the &sgtl_codec node, and describes the audio widgets and routes. See the simple-audio-card Device Tree binding

With this overlay in place, we need to enable it in the config.txt file, as well as the I2C1 overlay with a correct pin-muxing configuration:

dtparam=i2s=on
dtoverlay=sgtl5000
dtoverlay=i2c1,pins_2_3
# AUDIO_SD
gpio=40=op,dh

Once the system has booted, a new audio card is visible, and all the classic ALSA user-space utilities can be used: amixer to control the volume, aplay and arecord to play/record audio.

Conclusion

In this blog post, we have shown how Device Tree Overlays can easily be used to extend the description of the hardware, and enable the use of additional hardware devices on a Raspberry Pi system. Do not hesitate to contact us for support on Raspberry Pi platforms!

Back from ELCE: participation to the Device Tree workshop

After publishing our slides and videos from the Embedded Linux Conference Europe (ELCE), reporting on talks selected by Bootlin engineers, and mentioning the award given to Michael Opdenacker, here comes the last blog post giving feedback from our participation to the 2017 edition of this conference.

On Thursday after ELCE, Bootlin engineers Maxime Ripard and Thomas Petazzoni participated to the Device Tree workshop, a day-long meeting to discuss the status and future of Device Tree support, especially in the context of the Linux kernel.

Device Tree Workshoup group photo 2017

Beyond participating to the event, Maxime and Thomas also presented briefly on two topics:

  • Maxime Ripard brought up the topic of handling foreign DT bindings (see slides). Currently, the Device Tree bindings documentation is stored in the Linux kernel source tree, in Documentation/devicetree/bindings/. However, in theory, bindings are not operating-system specific, and indeed the same bindings are used in other projects: U-Boot, Barebox, FreeBSD, Zephyr, and probably more. Maxime raised the question of what these projects should do when they create new bindings or extend existing ones? Should they contribute a patch to Linux? Should we have a separate repository for DT bindings? A bit of discussion followed, but without getting to a real conclusion.
  • Thomas Petazzoni presented on the topic of avoiding duplication in Device Tree representations (see slides). Recent Marvell Armada processors have a hardware layout where a block containing multiple IPs is duplicated several times in the SoC. In the currently available Armada 8040 there are two copies of the CP110 hardware block, and the Linux kernel carries a separate description for each. While very similar, those descriptions have subtle differences that make it non-trivial to de-duplicate. However, future SoCs will not have just 2 copies of the same hardware block, 4 copies or potentially more. In such a situation, duplicating the Device Tree description is no longer reasonable. Thomas presented a solution based on the C pre-processor, and commented on other options, such as a script to generate DTs, or improvements in the DT compiler itself. A discussion around those options followed, and while tooling improvements were considered as being the long-term solution, in the short term the solution based on the C pre-processor was acceptable upstream.

For Bootlin, participating to such events is very important, as it allows to expose to kernel developers the issue we are facing in some of our projects, and to get direct feedback from the developers on how to move forward on those topics. We definitely intend to continue participating in similar events in the future, for topics of interest to Bootlin.

Device Tree on ARM article in French OpenSilicium magazine

Our French readers are most likely aware of the existence of a magazine called OpenSilicium, a magazine dedicated to embedded technologies, with frequent articles on platforms like the Raspberry Pi, the BeagleBone Black, topics like real-time, FPGA, Android and many others.

Open Silicium #17

Issue #17 of the magazine has been published recently, and features a 14-pages long article Introduction to the Device Tree on ARM, written by Bootlin engineer Thomas Petazzoni.

Open Silicium #17

Besides Thomas article, many other topics are covered in this issue:

  • A summary of the Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2015 in Dublin
  • Icestorm, a free development toolset for FPGA
  • Using the Armadeus APF27 board with Yocto
  • Set up an embedded Linux system on the Zynq ZedBoard
  • Debugging with OpenOCD and JTAG
  • Usage of the mbed SDK on a small microcontroller, the LPC810
  • From Javascript to VHDL, the art of writing synthetizable code using an imperative language
  • Optimization of the 3R strems decompression algorithm