TDA4VMXEVM: Uploading binary to RAM using CCS and debugger.

Hi Mateusz,

Mateusz Malanowski said:

Everything works, but based on address change, after more one hour we calculated, the average upload speed is around 21KiB/s.

What address change are you referring to here?

The 1hr you are taking about that is the debugger load to RAM or debugger load to RAM + Copy from RAM to eMMC?

I can check on Q1, Q2 and Q3 of yours. I'm thinking that the Uniflash tool can help here. Let me check.

EDIT: eMMC flash support as part of Uniflash is limited to raw data write to eMMC boot partition. We don’t have support for writing the data as a file to user area. So this won't be possible.

One question though - Can you use the SD card itself to flash to eMMC? Or the intention of this activity is to get rid of the SD card interface going into designing your custom boards?

Regards,

Karan

Karan Saxena said:

What address change are you referring to here?

I mean the current address which is displayed on progress bar window during binary uploading. We calculated the difference between start address and actual address, which after dividing gave uploading speed, equal around 21KiB/s.

Karan Saxena said:

The 1hr you are taking about that is the debugger load to RAM or debugger load to RAM + Copy from RAM to eMMC?

I am talking about time after which we calculated the speed, and it is time of binary to RAM uploading only. Copying from RAM to eMMC is much faster, and we did not include it during the measurements.
 

Karan Saxena said:

I can check on Q1, Q2 and Q3 of yours. I'm thinking that the Uniflash tool can help here. Let me check.
EDIT: eMMC flash support as part of Uniflash is limited to raw data write to eMMC boot partition. We don’t have support for writing the data as a file to user area. So this won't be possible.

I will be grateful for checking.
I have no experience with Uniflash, at this moment we flashing the binary image of the rootfs partition. If the access is possible to boot partition only, it is not solution for our case.

Karan Saxena said:

One question though - Can you use the SD card itself to flash to eMMC? Or the intention of this activity is to get rid of the SD card interface going into designing your custom boards?

We started our tests from copying image from SD to eMMC. I agree this is best option, but  we are working on the procedure which will be applicable on the custom PCB, where only eMMC will be available.

Hi Mateusz,

Yes, uniflash can not solve your issue.

Do you plan have USB interface on the custom PCBs? There is another method then which we can use.

Let me know and I can let you know.

Regards,

Karan

Hi Karan,
The task we are working for is focused on flashing using debugger. I'm afraid we won't be able to use other interfaces, but we do not exclude this possibility.
I started an internal discussion of which interfaces we will be available to use in final product.

Regards,
Mateusz

Hi Mateusz,

Mateusz Malanowski said:

I started an internal discussion of which interfaces we will be available to use in final product.

Let me know after this.

Essentially I would say that SD card -> eMMC will be the best, followed by dfu-util (USB), followed by xds560v2 and then finally xds110. I don't have a quantitative data on these but I can try to do some experiments once you let me know what all we can try out from.

Regards,

Karan

Hi Karan,

Unfortunately we must use JTAG.
At this moment we only need to know if we can increase speed on current hardware, and how much faster the xds560v2 would be.

Regards,
Mateusz

Hi Karan,

Do you have any results, how much faster xds560v2 is in comparison to xds110 for our purpose?

Regards,
Mateusz

Hi Mateusz,

I can do some measurements, can you let me know how big is your image?

Regards,

Karan

Hi Karan,

We are using images (or their parts) from 100MiB to 2GiB, and we noticed the upload speed is similar for any size of image in this range. I think the test for 100MiB binary will be enough, and it will allow to check it without waiting tens of hours.

Best regards,
Mateusz

Hi Mateusz,

I will try to flash a minimal file system using the method you mentioned in https://e2e.ti.com/support/processors/f/791/t/898360 and get back with results by next week.

Regards,

Karan

Hi Mateusz,

I had some discussions on this with the team and on second thoughts here, how do you plan to flash the u-boot, SPL etc in case you just have a JTAG interface?

I mean right now what you are doing is using 1. SD card to boot to uboot and then 2. JTAG to flash the rootfs. How will the step 1 happen in future?

Regards,
Karan

Hi Mateusz,

We are looking at this problem in detail now, trying to collate data on what use-cases can customers have. So in essence looking at what possible interface combinations they plan to have on their board and then suggest the best suited options. There are suggestions to do this over NW too.

Do you plan to have ETHERNET interface on your custom board? 

Regards,

Karan

Hi Karan,

About bootloader flashing, I know the eMMC will be flashable directly using its interface and dedicated programmer. In the future also flashing over the ethernet will be possible using R5 core.
I know, the JTAG is probably the worse method, but it is one of the required, probably because is only solution available for anyone in project until flashing over ethernet is not implemented.

Regards,
Mateusz