Increasing SD Card Boot Speed on the TMS320C5515

Mike241

I have a BOOT5505.BIN file that is about 100 kbytes. It currently takes about 5 seconds to boot. What means are available to boot the device more quickly? Could someone please confirm the feasibility of the following options to speed up the SD card boot?

1) Change a setting somewhere or get some form of firmware update to tell the DSP to boot from the SD card first.

2) Have the DSP boot from a faster clock. (I'm currently running off of the RTC clock.)

3) Any other means.

Thank you in advance.

over 14 years ago

0 Steve Tsang over 14 years ago

TI__Mastermind 23785 points

Current C5515/05 series of products only boot for peripherals in a preset order. In the new generation, we will support programmable boot configuration.

The bootloader in current series set the lock to 12.288 MHz by itself.

Refer to DPRABD7 Bootloader Application Note for details.

Regards.

0 Mike241 over 14 years ago in reply to Steve Tsang

Intellectual 620 points

Thank you for your response, Steve. I took another look at SPRABD7 as you suggested and realized why I was confused. I must have skipped over section 2.1 when I read it last.

Does the 5-second boot time I quoted fall within the expected boot behavior of the 5515? If not, I may need some direction on what to look for .

0 Steve Tsang over 14 years ago in reply to Mike241

TI__Mastermind 23785 points

Yes. Your case is affected by the size of your file and the transfer rate of SD card used.

0 Mike241 over 14 years ago in reply to Steve Tsang

Intellectual 620 points

Let me make sure I understand this correctly. The only means to boot faster from SD are to either write a smaller program or buy a faster SD card. Is that correct?

0 Renjith Thomas over 13 years ago in reply to Mike241

Guru 31670 points

Mike,

We've done boot time optimization on different TI platforms and has achieved very good boot time numbers as good as 2.6 secs on Linux with applications. We could boot linux kernel with bootloader and mount the filesystem in about 700ms on DM36x. If you are interested please get in touch with us.

-Renjith

www.pathpartnertech.com

0 Jrvanho over 13 years ago in reply to Mike241

Intellectual 730 points

Mike,

Something you might consider is to configuring the PLL and MMC interface registers in your binary file. This could speed up the transfer rate. Just remember that you will need to reconfigure all of those things in your application.

Cheers!

0 Michael Lillywhite over 13 years ago in reply to Jrvanho

Prodigy 10 points

Thank you Renjith and Jrvanho,

The boot time ended up not being as big an issue as originally thought. I am sure your comments in this thread will continue to help other users later. Thanks to all.

Processors

Processors forum

Increasing SD Card Boot Speed on the TMS320C5515