Description
In the context of a SUSE customer inquiry last year, a Forlinx OKMX8MX-C arm64 board had been relayed to me from China that a customer was not successful booting SUSE Linux Micro on. Typically this happens when the vendor's bootloader (e.g., U-Boot) is not configured properly (e.g., U-Boot's distro boot) to be compliant with Arm SystemReady Devicetree (formerly IR) band. Unfortunately I could not immediately get it to emit any output, to even diagnose why it wasn't working. There was no public documentation on the vendor's website to even confirm I was checking the right UARTs.
Earlier this year (2024) I happened to meet the ODM/OEM, Forlinx, at Embedded World 2024 in Nuremberg and again the Monday before Hackweek 24 at Electronica 2024 in Munich. The big puzzle was that the PCB print "OKMX8MX-C" does not match any current Forlinx product, there being OKMX8MM-C and OKMX8MP-C products with the Mini and Plus variants of NXP i.MX 8M family instead. One suggestion from Forlinx staff was to double-check the DIP switches on the board for boot mode selection.
Goals
Double-check the board name and investigate further what may be wrong with this board.
Resources
none
Progress
- The board name is indeed as spelled above, not matching any product on forlinx.net.
- The DIP switches were set to boot from microSD.
- Changing the DIP switches to eMMC boot did result in UART1 RS-232 output! (although at times garbled with the cable supplied and USB adapter used)
- As feared, it did not automatically load our GRUB from USB.
- Booting our GRUB manually from USB (via eMMC U-Boot commands fatload+bootefi) was unsuccessful, with partially Chinese error messages.
- This confirmed the initial suspicion, already shared with Forlinx at Embedded World 2024, that the Forlinx System-on-Module's boot firmware was not Arm SystemReady Devicetree compliant and that a firmware update would be necessary to remedy that.
- The microSD card turned out not to contain a bootable image but to only include Chinese-language board documentation (dated 20220507) and BSP files. They used a diverging name of OKMX8MQ-C.
This project is part of:
Hack Week 24
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