OMAPL138: Can I boot DSP independently ?

OMAPL138 is a ARM boot device and hence an ARM executable must be booted first. On OMAPL138, ARM ROM bootloader will read from the boot medium and begin sequentially executing the AIS commands in the boot image and do the required device configurations. Once this is done the DSP can be woken up by taking it out of reset. Once DSP is woken up, you can shut down and restarted independently. 

Can you describe why you wish to boot the DSP independently and how you envisioned the boot media to support this use case?

DSP_BOOTMODE_NOBOOT is not a macro defined in the bootloader software package so I am assuming you are refering to the DSPLINK package. The different boot modes in that package are described by Deepali in the following post:

http://e2e.ti.com/support/embedded/bios/f/355/p/71283/267830.aspx#267830

DSPLINK package supports multiple ARM+DSP SOC devices including OMAPL137 which is a DSP boot device. On that device, the DSPLINK doesn`t have to bring the DSP out of reset to load the code. I would imagine DSP_BOOTMODE_NOBOOT is applicable to those devices where the DSP has booted from flash(or other boot media) before an DSPLINK APIs are used to load and run code from the ARM side.

Hope this clarifies the use of that macro.

Regards,

Rahul