TDA4VM: Fast boot time on MCU domain

Uros Zivkovic

Part Number: TDA4VM

Hi,

As i went through technical documentation and training slides, i understand that MCU domain of TDA4 supports fast boot.
We are in no condition to test ourselves, but we would like to know what is the time of fast boot time on MCU domain.
Can you provide some kind of information regarding this, even approximate numbers of estimated boot time are welcome?

Thanks in advance.

over 5 years ago

0 Jonathan Bergsagel over 5 years ago

TI__Intellectual 800 points

Hi Uros,

It really depends on the specific scenario you're looking at. There are a number of different types of cores on the device that can be booted. The image sizes for each core can vary widely. Also, there are RTOS and HLOS boot options. So, it depends on the number of cores you are booting and the size of each of the core images that are required for a specific application.

Can you give some more specifics about which boot scenario you are interested in?

Thanks,

Jonathan

0 Uros Zivkovic over 5 years ago in reply to Jonathan Bergsagel

Intellectual 830 points

Hi Jonathan,

Sorry that i was not specific, we are in need to determine what is the minimum boot time for one of general purpose arm cores, i.e the minimum time to get one core to be alive using either RTOS or Linux provided by TI. Hence only MCU domain have support for fast boot (as i understood), MCU's R5 core running RTOS would be the fastest one to boot theoretically.

If that is the subject for future testing, i was wondering then do you have any data of fast boot time on MCU domain using the "vanilla" software, the prebuidl binaries you supply with processor sdk automotive? I know that would give us only approximate time, but it would be sufficient at this stage.

Or if you can help or suggest something else in any way, it would also be appreciated.

Regards.

0 Jonathan Bergsagel over 5 years ago in reply to Uros Zivkovic

TI__Intellectual 800 points

Hi Uros,

It depends highly on your selected boot media, but assuming you're booting an RTOS image to the MCU R5 from the OSPI flash and you're set up to use the "cust" SBL (bootloader) build, with minimal set up time for the MCU domain, which you've built from the latest PSDKRA release (as shown at the link below), then you can have your RTOS image booted on the R5 in well under 100 ms after Power ON (assuming the RTOS image is not extremely large, of course). The SBL has to transfer the RTOS image out of the flash into the target memory (unless you're running an application in flash 'XIP' mode), so it will impact your boot time somewhat, the larger your image is. Your initial boot time will be even less if the application is running 'XIP' directly out of the flash.

Latest PSDKRA release software: http://software-dl.ti.com/jacinto7/esd/processor-sdk-rtos-jacinto7/latest/index_FDS.html

While we're also working on further boot time optimizations, the current MCUSW "CAN response and Bootloader" demo app in the release shows an example of the SBL loading the demo app for Early CAN response, and then executing boot operations for the other MAIN domain cores as well. You can see instructions for how to build this application (along with the matching SBL bootloader build) here:

http://software-dl.ti.com/jacinto7/esd/processor-sdk-rtos-jacinto7/latest/exports/docs/mcusw/mcal_drv/docs/drv_docs/demo_boot_app_mcu_rtos_top.html

After the example application has started and also handled the Early CAN response, then it takes on the order of another couple hundred milliseconds or so to parse & boot the application images for the other remote cores in the MAIN domain.

You can see some example logs, with boot times listed from the demo app (booted from OSPI flash), here:

http://software-dl.ti.com/jacinto7/esd/processor-sdk-rtos-jacinto7/latest/exports/docs/mcusw/mcal_drv/docs/drv_docs/demo_boot_app_mcu_rtos_top.html#demo_boot_app_mcu_rtos_main_domain_rtos_can_output_loopback

Regards,

Jonathan

Processors

Processors forum

TDA4VM: Fast boot time on MCU domain