NXP i.MX8MN EVK (Cortex-A53)

Overview

i.MX8M Nano LPDDR4 EVK board is based on NXP i.MX8M Nano applications processor, composed of a quad Cortex®-A53 cluster and a single Cortex®-M7 core. Zephyr OS is ported to run on the Cortex®-A53 core.

Board features:
- RAM: 2GB LPDDR4
- Storage:
  - SanDisk 16GB eMMC5.1
  - Micron 32MB QSPI NOR
  - microSD Socket
- Wireless:
  - WiFi: 2.4/5GHz IEEE 802.11b/g/n
  - Bluetooth: v4.1
- USB:
  - OTG - 2x type C
- Ethernet
- PCI-E M.2
- Connectors:
  - 40-Pin Dual Row Header
- LEDs:
  - 1x Power status LED
  - 1x UART LED
- Debug
  - JTAG 20-pin connector
  - MicroUSB for UART debug, two COM ports for A53 and M7

More information about the board can be found at the NXP website.

Supported Features

The Zephyr mimx8mn_evk board configuration supports the following hardware features:

Interface	Controller	Driver/Component
GIC-v3	on-chip	interrupt controller
ARM TIMER	on-chip	system clock
UART	on-chip	serial port

Devices

System Clock

This board configuration uses a system clock frequency of 8 MHz.

Serial Port

This board configuration uses a single serial communication channel with the CPU’s UART4.

Programming and Debugging

Copy the compiled zephyr.bin to the first FAT partition of the SD card and plug the SD card into the board. Power it up and stop the u-boot execution at prompt.

Use U-Boot to load and kick zephyr.bin:

fatload mmc 1:1 0x93c00000 zephyr.bin; dcache flush; icache flush; dcache off; icache off; go 0x93c00000

Or kick SMP zephyr.bin:

fatload mmc 1:1 0x93c00000 zephyr.bin; dcache flush; icache flush; dcache off; icache off; cpu 2 release 0x93c00000

Use this configuration to run basic Zephyr applications and kernel tests, for example, with the Basic Synchronization sample:

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b imx8mn_evk/mimx8mn6/a53 samples/synchronization
west build -t run

This will build an image with the synchronization sample app, boot it and display the following ram console output:

*** Booting Zephyr OS build zephyr-v3.1.0-3575-g44dd713bd883  ***
thread_a: Hello World from cpu 0 on mimx8mn_evk_a53!
thread_b: Hello World from cpu 0 on mimx8mn_evk_a53!
thread_a: Hello World from cpu 0 on mimx8mn_evk_a53!
thread_b: Hello World from cpu 0 on mimx8mn_evk_a53!
thread_a: Hello World from cpu 0 on mimx8mn_evk_a53!

Use Jailhouse hypervisor, after root cell linux is up:

#jailhouse enable imx8mn.cell
#jailhouse cell create imx8mn-zephyr.cell
#jailhouse cell load 1 zephyr.bin -a 0x93c00000
#jailhouse cell start 1