NXP i.MX8MP EVK (Cortex-A53)

Overview

i.MX8M Plus LPDDR4 EVK board is based on NXP i.MX8M Plus 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 M4

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

Supported Features

The Zephyr mimx8mp_evk_a53 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 non-smp zephyr.bin:

mw 303d0518 f 1; fatload mmc 1:1 0xc0000000 zephyr.bin; dcache flush; icache flush; dcache off; icache off; go 0xc0000000

Or kick SMP zephyr.bin:

mw 303d0518 f 1; fatload mmc 1:1 0xc0000000 zephyr.bin; dcache flush; icache flush; dcache off; icache off; cpu 2 release 0xc0000000

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 mimx8mp_evk_a53 samples/synchronization
west build -t run

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

*** Booting Zephyr OS build zephyr-v3.1.0-3575-g44dd713bd883  ***
thread_a: Hello World from cpu 0 on mimx8mp_evk_a53!
thread_b: Hello World from cpu 0 on mimx8mp_evk_a53!
thread_a: Hello World from cpu 0 on mimx8mp_evk_a53!
thread_b: Hello World from cpu 0 on mimx8mp_evk_a53!
thread_a: Hello World from cpu 0 on mimx8mp_evk_a53!

Use Jailhouse hypervisor, after root cell linux is up:

#jailhouse enable imx8mp.cell
#jailhouse cell create imx8mp-zephyr.cell
#jailhouse cell load 1 zephyr.bin -a 0xc0000000
#jailhouse cell start 1

References