Supporting NAND on SpiStack via the LS1012A’s QuadSPI Controller

We’ve recently provided software support to Analogue & Micro who are developing hardware derived from NXP’s Layerscape FRWY-LS1012A reference design. What we find interesting about this reference design is that for storage it uses an innovative SPI memory known as SpiStack Flash. Essentially it’s a single chip with a quad-SPI interface, but inside are two …

An overview of OpenSBI

Thanks to BeagleBoard.org, we’ve recently received a pre-production beta version of the BeagleV StarLight development board. It’s an affordable Linux platform that’s truly open source with it’s software, hardware design and RISC-V instruction set architecture all made available under free and open licenses. When we booted the board for the first time we noticed some …

An overview of PSCI

If you boot a 64-bit kernel on an ARMv8-A platform, you’ll probably notice some output relating to PSCI. In this post, we’re going to explore what this is and why it’s there. The Power State Coordination Interface (PSCI) is an ARM standard that describes a software interface for power management between an operating system (not …

5 Serial Automation Gotchas

Automated tests that make use of interactive consoles are commonplace. Whether it’s a Linux console over a serial port or a proprietary CLI over a network socket – they require little in terms of hardware yet give access to lots of functionality. However writing a reliable automated test can be more challenging and time consuming …

Flattened uImage Tree (FIT) Images

You’re probably familiar with the steps required to boot Linux from U-Boot: you first load several binaries into memory, perhaps a device tree, a kernel, maybe even an initrd. You then invoke a command such as bootm or booti with arguments providing memory addresses for the binaries you’ve just loaded. However there is a much …