TMDS64EVM: Enabling TISCI Trace in U-Boot

Philippe Schenker

Part Number: TMDS64EVM

Tool/software:

Hello

During development I often got errors from SYSFW that I was not able to interpret. That is the reason why I want to be able to use the debug trace feature. I tried enabling it with this patch

diff --git a/board/ti/am64x/board-cfg.yaml b/board/ti/am64x/board-cfg.yaml
index 8981b75caa27..ca1aa22d8965 100644
--- a/board/ti/am64x/board-cfg.yaml
+++ b/board/ti/am64x/board-cfg.yaml
@@ -27,10 +27,10 @@ board-cfg:
                 subhdr:
                         magic: 0xA5C3
                         size: 5
-                msmc_cache_size: 0x0
+                msmc_cache_size: 0x1C
         debug_cfg:
                 subhdr:
                         magic: 0x020C
                         size: 8
-                trace_dst_enables: 0x00
-                trace_src_enables: 0x00
+                trace_dst_enables: 0x0D
+                trace_src_enables: 0x3F

I made sure the corresponding UART is enabled and should work however there is nothing coming on the UART. I tried the FAQ tutorial for SBL with MCU+SDK there it works.

What am I missing here?

Best Regards,
Philippe

1 month ago

0 Meet Thakar 1 month ago

TI__Genius 10875 points

Hi Philippe,

Steps to enable these logs are mentioned here: https://software-dl.ti.com/processor-sdk-linux/esd/AM64X/11_01_05_03/exports/docs/linux/How_to_Guides/Host/SYSFW_Trace_Parser.html#enabling-sysfw-traces-via-board-configuration

According to this your steps seem correct, you need to rebuild the u-boot once after making this changes, could you confirm if that was taken care of?

Best Regards,
Meet.

0 Dominic Rath 1 month ago in reply to Meet Thakar

Mastermind 7450 points

Hi,

we had issues enabling SysFW trace with SDK 11.01 recently, too.

I believe in the end the problems were down to UART configuration:

make sure U-Boot and Linux don't use MAIN UART1
make sure U-Boot SPL R5f configures pinmuxing for MAIN UART1

I'm not sure what changes exactly were necessary in the end, because a colleague did the actual modifications, but I believe we had to modify the device tree for U-Boot and Linux. It's possible we also had to change the code in am642_init.c in U-Boot, because the assumption that "serial3" is "MAIN UART 1" as explained in this comment isn't true for SDK 11.01 anymore (not sure when this changed):

https://git.ti.com/cgit/ti-u-boot/ti-u-boot/tree/arch/arm/mach-k3/am64x/am642_init.c?h=ti-u-boot-2025.01#n202

Eventually we got it working, but there were additional changes necessary, not just board-cfg.yaml.

Regards,

Dominic

0 Philippe Schenker 30 days ago

Prodigy 30 points

Thanks Meet and Dominic for your suggestions!

It suddenly started working when I loaded an R5 firmware that previously also generated some TISCI output on UART1. However since i have UART1 in device-tree and it gets configured by U-Boot I would also expect that TISCI trace works only when U-Boot is being started (as soon as boardcfg is loaded and UART1 is configured).

I will double check the pinmuxing, clock and pm config.

Best Regards,
Philippe

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TMDS64EVM: Enabling TISCI Trace in U-Boot