Tag: marvell

Linux 4.9 released, Bootlin contributions

Linus Torvalds has released the 4.9 Linux kernel yesterday, as was expected. With 16214 non-merge commits, this is by far the busiest kernel development cycle ever, but in large part due to the merging of thousands of commits to add support for Greybus. LWN has very well summarized what’s new in this kernel release: 4.9 Merge window part 1, 4.9 Merge window part 2, The end of the 4.9 merge window.

As usual, we take this opportunity to look at the contributions Bootlin made to this kernel release. In total, we contributed 116 non-merge commits. Our most significant contributions this time have been:

  • Bootlin engineer Boris Brezillon, already a maintainer of the Linux kernel NAND subsystem, becomes a co-maintainer of the overall MTD subsystem.
  • Contribution of an input ADC resistor ladder driver, written by Alexandre Belloni. As explained in the commit log: common way of multiplexing buttons on a single input in cheap devices is to use a resistor ladder on an ADC. This driver supports that configuration by polling an ADC channel provided by IIO.
  • On Atmel platforms, improvements to clock handling, bug fix in the Atmel HLCDC display controller driver.
  • On Marvell EBU platforms
    • Addition of clock drivers for the Marvell Armada 3700 (Cortex-A53 based), by Grégory Clement
    • Several bug fixes and improvements to the Marvell CESA driver, for the crypto engine founds in most Marvell EBU processors. By Romain Perier and Thomas Petazzoni
    • Support for the PIC interrupt controller, used on the Marvell Armada 7K/8K SoCs, currently used for the PMU (Performance Monitoring Unit). By Thomas Petazzoni.
    • Enabling of Armada 8K devices, with support for the slave CP110 and the first Armada 8040 development board. By Thomas Petazzoni.
  • On Allwinner platforms
    • Addition of GPIO support to the AXP209 driver, which is used to control the PMIC used on most Allwinner designs. Done by Maxime Ripard.
    • Initial support for the Nextthing GR8 SoC. By Mylène Josserand and Maxime Ripard (pinctrl driver and Device Tree)
    • The improved sunxi-ng clock code, introduced in Linux 4.8, is now used for Allwinner A23 and A33. Done by Maxime Ripard.
    • Add support for the Allwinner A33 display controller, by re-using and extending the existing sun4i DRM/KMS driver. Done by Maxime Ripard.
    • Addition of bridge support in the sun4i DRM/KMS driver, as well as the code for a RGB to VGA bridge, used by the C.H.I.P VGA expansion board. By Maxime Ripard.
  • Numerous cleanups and improvements commits in the UBI subsystem, in preparation for merging the support for Multi-Level Cells NAND, from Boris Brezillon.
  • Improvements in the MTD subsystem, by Boris Brezillon:
    • Addition of mtd_pairing_scheme, a mechanism which allows to express the pairing of NAND pages in Multi-Level Cells NANDs.
    • Improvements in the selection of NAND timings.

In addition, a number of Bootlin engineers are also maintainers in the Linux kernel, so they review and merge patches from other developers, and send pull requests to other maintainers to get those patches integrated. This lead to the following activity:

  • Maxime Ripard, as the Allwinner co-maintainer, merged 78 patches from other developers.
  • Grégory Clement, as the Marvell EBU co-maintainer, merged 43 patches from other developers.
  • Alexandre Belloni, as the RTC maintainer and Atmel co-maintainer, merged 26 patches from other developers.
  • Boris Brezillon, as the MTD NAND maintainer, merged 24 patches from other developers.

The complete list of our contributions to this kernel release:

A Kickstarter for a low cost Marvell ARM64 board

At the beginning of October a Kickstarter campaign was launched to fund the development of a low-cost board based on one of the latest Marvell ARM 64-bit SoC: the Armada 3700. While being under $50, the board would allow using most of the Armada 3700 features:

  • Gigabit Ethernet
  • SATA
  • USB 3.0
  • miniPCIe

ESPRESSObin interfaces

The Kickstarter campaign was started by Globalscale Technologies, who has already produced numerous Marvell boards in the past: the Armada 370 based Mirabox, the Kirkwood based SheevaPlug, DreamPlug and more.

We pushed the initial support of this SoC to the mainline Linux kernel 6 months ago, and it landed in Linux 4.6. There are still a number of hardware features that are not yet supported in the mainline kernel, but we are actively working on it. As an example, support for the PCIe controller was merged in Linux 4.8, released last Sunday. According to the Kickstarter page the first boards would be delivered in January 2017 and by this time we hope to have managed to push more support for this SoC to the mainline Linux kernel.

We have been working on the mainline support of the Marvell SoC for 4 years and we are glad to see at last the first board under $50 using this SoC. We hope it will help expanding the open source community around this SoC family and will bring more contributions to the Marvell EBU SoCs.

Linux 4.8 released, Bootlin contributions

Adelie PenguinLinux 4.8 has been released on Sunday by Linus Torvalds, with numerous new features and improvements that have been described in details on LWN: part 1, part 2 and part 3. KernelNewbies also has an updated page on the 4.8 release. We contributed a total of 153 patches to this release. LWN also published some statistics about this development cycle.

Our most significant contributions:

  • Boris Brezillon improved the Rockchip PWM driver to avoid glitches basing that work on his previous improvement to the PWM subsystem already merged in the kernel. He also fixed a few issues and shortcomings in the pwm regulator driver. This is finishing his work on the Rockchip based Chromebook platforms where a PWM is used for a regulator.
  • While working on the driver for the sii902x HDMI transceiver, Boris Brezillon did a cleanup of many DRM drivers. Those drivers were open coding the encoder selection. This is now done in the core DRM subsystem.
  • On the support of Atmel platforms
    • Alexandre Belloni cleaned up the existing board device trees, removing unused clock definitions and starting to remove warnings when compiling with the Device Tree Compiler (dtc).
  • On the support of Allwinner platforms
    • Maxime Ripard contributed a brand new infrastructure, named sunxi-ng, to manage the clocks of the Allwinner platforms, fixing shortcomings of the Device Tree representation used by the existing implementation. He moved the support of the Allwinner H3 clocks to this new infrastructure.
    • Maxime also developed a driver for the Allwinner A10 Digital Audio controller, bringing audio support to this platform.
    • Boris Brezillon improved the Allwinner NAND controller driver to support DMA assisted operations, which brings a very nice speed-up to throughput on platforms using NAND flashes as the storage, which is the case of Nextthing’s C.H.I.P.
    • Quentin Schulz added support for the Allwinner R16 EVB (Parrot) board.
  • On the support of Marvell platforms
    • Grégory Clément added multiple clock definitions for the Armada 37xx series of SoCs.
    • He also corrected a few issues with the I/O coherency on some Marvell SoCs
    • Romain Perier worked on the Marvell CESA cryptography driver, bringing significant performance improvements, especially for dmcrypt usage. This driver is used on numerous Marvell platforms: Orion, Kirkwood, Armada 370, XP, 375 and 38x.
    • Thomas Petazzoni submitted a driver for the Aardvark PCI host controller present in the Armada 3700, enabling PCI support for this platform.
    • Thomas also added a driver for the new XOR engine found in the Armada 7K and Armada 8K families

Here are in details, the different contributions we made to this release:

Initial support for ARM64 Marvell Armada 7K/8K platform

Two weeks ago, we submitted the initial support for the Marvell Armada 3700, which was the first ARM64 platform that Bootlin engineers contributed to the upstream Linux kernel.

Today, we submitted initial support for another Marvell ARM64 platform, the Armada 7K and Armada 8K platform. Compared to the Armada 3700, the Armada 7K and 8K are much more on the high-end side: they use a dual Cortex-A72 or a quad Cortex-A72, as opposed to the Cortex-A53 for the Armada 3700.

Marvell Armada 7KMarvell Armada 8K

The Armada 7K and 8K also use a fairly unique architecture, internally they are composed of several components:

  • One AP (Application Processor), which contains the processor itself and a few core hardware blocks. The AP used in the Armada 7K and 8K is called AP806, and is available in two configurations: dual Cortex-A72 and quad Cortex-A72.
  • One or two CP (Communication Processor), which contain most of the I/O interfaces (SATA, PCIe, Ethernet, etc.). The 7K family chips have one CP, while the 8K family chips integrate two CPs, providing two times the number of I/O interfaces available in the CP. The CP used in the 7K and 8K is called CP110.

All in all, this gives the following combinations:

  • Armada 7020, which is a dual Cortex-A72 with one CP
  • Armada 7040, which is a quad Cortex-A72 with one CP
  • Armada 8020, which is a dual Cortex-A72 with two CPs
  • Armada 8040, which is a quad Cortex-A72 with two CPs

So far, we submitted initial support only for the AP806 part of the chip, with the following patch series:

We will continue to submit more and more patches to support other features of the Armada 7K and 8K processors in the near future.

Bootlin contributes Linux support for a first ARM64 platform: Marvell Armada 3700

Marvell Armada 3700Over the last years, Bootlin has become a strong participant to the Linux ARM kernel community, with our engineers upstreaming support for numerous ARM 32 bits platforms.

Now, with ARM64 becoming more and more mainstream, our focus in 2016 will shift towards this architecture, and we’re happy to announce that we have recently contributed to the upstream Linux kernel the initial support for our first ARM64 architecture: the Marvell Armada 3700.

This new SoC from Marvell is available in single-core and dual-core Cortex-A53 configurations, and features a wide range of peripherals: 2 Gigabit Ethernet controllers, USB 3.0 and 2.0, SATA, PCIe interfaces, DMA engines for XOR acceleration, and of course the usual SPI, I2C, UART, GPIO, SDIO interfaces. For more details, see the Product Brief.

So far, we have sent a patch series adding minimal support for this platform:

  • A UART driver, since this SoC uses a new specific UART controller
  • Small changes to an AHCI driver to support SATA.
  • The Device Tree files describing the SoC and the currently available development board. So far, only the CPU, timers, UART0, USB 3.0, SATA and GIC interrupt controllers are described.

A second version of the patch series was sent a few days later, in order to address comments received during the review.

It is worth mentioning that this SoC was publicly announced in a press release on January 6 2016, and we’ve been able to send the initial support patches on February 2, 2016, less than a month later.

We’ll be progressively submitting support for all the other hardware blocks of the Armada 3700, and also be announcing soon our development efforts on several other ARM64 platforms.

Marvell publishes the datasheet of the Armada XP processor

thumb-armada-xpA bit more than a month after publishing the datasheet of the Armada 370 processor, Marvell has now released a similar datasheet for the more powerful Armada XP processor. The datasheet is available as a PDF document, with no registration, at http://www.marvell.com/embedded-processors/armada-xp/assets/ARMADA-XP-Functional-SpecDatasheet.pdf, with a link to it clearly visible on the Armada XP product page.

As most of our readers probably know, Bootlin has been working and continues to work significantly on the Linux kernel support for Marvell processors. Thanks to this work done for more than two years now, the mainline Linux kernel has pretty good support for the Armada XP processor. This processor is a nice monster: up to 4 cores (PJ4B cores, which are roughly equivalent to Cortex-A9 but with LPAE support), up to 10 PCIe interfaces, multiple SATA interfaces, up to four Gigabit network interfaces, and many, many other things (XOR engine, cryptographic engine, etc.). Many of the processor features are already supported in mainline, and lately we’ve been focusing on power management features: cpuidle support for Armada XP will be part of 3.16, cpufreq support will either be part of 3.17 or 3.18, and suspend/resume should hopefully be part of 3.18.

The Armada XP processor is used in publicly available products:

At Bootlin, we are again really happy to see Marvell opening this datasheet, as it will allow all community developers to further improve support for this processor in the Linux kernel, but also in other open-source projects.

Marvell publishes the datasheet of the Armada 370 processor

thumb-armada-xpOver the last two years, Bootlin has contributed support for the Marvell Armada 370 and Marvell Armada XP processors to the mainline Linux kernel. These ARM processors are used mainly in Network Attached Storage devices but also in other devices such as printers. Until now the datasheet for these processors was only available for Marvell customers and partners under NDA, but last week, Marvell finally released the datasheet of the Armada 370 publicly, with no restriction, no registration, no NDA. The Armada 370 processor can already be found in several consumer grade products:

From now on, on the Marvell page (broken link removed) related to the Armada 3xx family, the Armada 370 Functional Specification (broken link removed) as well as the Armada 370 Hardware Specifications (broken link removed) can be found. While the Armada XP datasheet is not available at this time, it is worth mentioning that the vast majority of the peripherals are exactly the same between Armada 370 and Armada XP, so even Armada XP users will find useful information in this datasheet.

Bootlin is happy to see that Marvell is making more and more progress towards mainlining their kernel support and opening their datasheets publicly. We strongly believe that the openness of these datasheets will allow hobbyists and developers to improve the support for Armada 370 in the open-source ecosystem, be it in the Linux kernel, in bootloaders like U-Boot or Barebox or even in other projects.

Contributions to Barebox: initial Marvell SoC support

Barebox is a bootloader that strives to be a modern alternative to U-Boot. It currently supports ARM, Blackfin, MIPS, NIOS2, OpenRISC, PowerPC and x86 as CPU architectures, and while it doesn’t have as much hardware support as U-Boot yet, it does have a number of very significant advantages over U-Boot: a proper device model very similar to the one used in the Linux kernel, which makes the code very clean and nice, and a configuration system that uses kconfig, like the Linux kernel, which is a lot better than the per-board header files used by U-Boot with lots of cryptic macros.

Bootlin had already contributed to Barebox in the past, as our engineer Maxime Ripard added the support for the Crystalfontz i.MX28 boards.

More recently, we contributed basic support for the Marvell Kirkwood, Marvell Armada 370 and Marvell Armada XP ARM processors. This work was released as part of the 2013.07.0 release. For now, the support is fairly minimal, as it only allows to boot a Barebox bootloader that has serial port support. The most important part of the work was to write a kwbimage tool (see kwbimage.c), which allows to generate bootable images for Marvell processors. Our work contained minimal support for the Armada XP-based OpenBlocks AX3 board, the Armada XP-based GP development board, the Armada 370-based Mirabox from Globalscale and the Kirkwood-based Guruplug from Globalscale. Our work was quickly extended by Sebastian Hesselbarth, who added basic support for the Marvell Dove processor, and the Cubox platform from SolidRun, which uses the Dove processor.

Of course, such support is far from being complete, we are hoping in the future to add support for network, NAND and SD, in order to make Barebox really useful and usable on Marvell platforms.

The details of our contributions are: