am3352: SPI boot issue

Blake Carpenter

Part Number: AM3352
Other Parts Discussed in Thread: AM3352

Hi,

I have a customer with an issue with the SPI port on the AM3352. They are running Linux.

SW has reported that the SPI has three basic divisions. It sets up DDR3 then in the next division it sets up to run UBOOT. Right when they get the address for UBOOT to run they get a memory allocation error for the SRAM of the micro. Remember this happens randomly (about 1 of 3) for those with the problem and so works normally 2/3 of the time. Is there any TI notes or data on timing problems with UBOOT and SRAM?

Does this trigger any ideas of any known issues?

Best Regards,

Blake

over 7 years ago

0 Biser Gatchev-XID over 7 years ago

TI__Guru**** 393215 points

Hi Blake,

Can you get the boot log and post it here? Is this internal SRAM or external DDR memory that gives the error?

0 Blake Carpenter over 7 years ago in reply to Biser Gatchev-XID

TI__Expert 7035 points

Hi Biser,

Internal SRAM.

Blake

0 Steve Kipisz over 7 years ago in reply to Blake Carpenter

TI__Genius 15510 points

Hi Blake,
Can you post the boot log? And which SDK are they using?

Steve K.

0 Blake Carpenter over 7 years ago in reply to Steve Kipisz

TI__Expert 7035 points

Hi Steve,

This is a very old product that has historically never seen this failure. Based on some recent customer returns, they observed this failure on the production line in about 10% of cases. Swapping the processor fixes the problem. Swapping the Serial Flash does not. It does talk to the serial flash and returns the production date stored there. The units will start and run perfectly if power cycled enough. Processor speed of 800MHz, DDR3 303MHz. I'll work on the SDK version, but it is circa ~2012.

Here is the error that gets sent out the console almost immediately after booting. Doesn’t even get to the splashscreen.

U-Boot SPL 2013.01.01-ga5fd50d (Aug 01 2017 - 12:48:13)

SPI error: malloc of SPI structure failed

SF: Failed to set up slave

SPI probe failed.

### ERROR ### Please RESET the board ###

Thanks!

Blake

0 Blake Carpenter over 7 years ago in reply to Blake Carpenter

TI__Expert 7035 points

Kernel 3.2.28

0 Steve Kipisz over 7 years ago in reply to Blake Carpenter

TI__Genius 15510 points

Blake,
Do you have JTAG capability? If so can you set a breakpoint and look at malloc returns when it fails?

Also, are you sure malloc is returning a pointer to memory in SRAM? If I look at am335x_evm.h I see
#define CONFIG_SYS_SPL_MALLOC_START 0x80208000
#define CONFIG_SYS_SPL_MALLOC_SIZE 0x100000

Which would mean malloc is returning a pointer to DDR.

Steve K.

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am3352: SPI boot issue