1 Microchip PolarFire SoC Icicle Kit (``microchip-icicle-kit``)
2 =============================================================
4 Microchip PolarFire SoC Icicle Kit integrates a PolarFire SoC, with one
5 SiFive's E51 plus four U54 cores and many on-chip peripherals and an FPGA.
7 For more details about Microchip PolarFire SoC, please see:
8 https://www.microsemi.com/product-directory/soc-fpgas/5498-polarfire-soc-fpga
10 The Icicle Kit board information can be found here:
11 https://www.microsemi.com/existing-parts/parts/152514
16 The ``microchip-icicle-kit`` machine supports the following devices:
20 * Core Level Interruptor (CLINT)
21 * Platform-Level Interrupt Controller (PLIC)
22 * L2 Loosely Integrated Memory (L2-LIM)
23 * DDR memory controller
26 * 2 GEM Ethernet controllers
27 * 1 SDHC storage controller
32 The ``microchip-icicle-kit`` machine can start using the standard -bios
33 functionality for loading its BIOS image, aka Hart Software Services (HSS_).
34 HSS loads the second stage bootloader U-Boot from an SD card. Then a kernel
35 can be loaded from U-Boot. It also supports direct kernel booting via the
36 -kernel option along with the device tree blob via -dtb. When direct kernel
37 boot is used, the OpenSBI fw_dynamic BIOS image is used to boot a payload
38 like U-Boot or OS kernel directly.
40 The user provided DTB should have the following requirements:
42 * The /cpus node should contain at least one subnode for E51 and the number
43 of subnodes should match QEMU's ``-smp`` option
44 * The /memory reg size should match QEMU’s selected ram_size via ``-m``
45 * Should contain a node for the CLINT device with a compatible string
48 QEMU follows below truth table to select which payload to execute:
50 ===== ========== ========== =======
51 -bios -kernel -dtb payload
52 ===== ========== ========== =======
54 Y don't care don't care HSS
56 ===== ========== ========== =======
58 The memory is set to 1537 MiB by default which is the minimum required high
59 memory size by HSS. A sanity check on ram size is performed in the machine
60 init routine to prompt user to increase the RAM size to > 1537 MiB when less
61 than 1537 MiB ram is detected.
66 HSS 2020.12 release is tested at the time of writing. To build an HSS image
67 that can be booted by the ``microchip-icicle-kit`` machine, type the following
68 in the HSS source tree:
72 $ export CROSS_COMPILE=riscv64-linux-
73 $ cp boards/mpfs-icicle-kit-es/def_config .config
74 $ make BOARD=mpfs-icicle-kit-es
76 Download the official SD card image released by Microchip and prepare it for
81 $ wget ftp://ftpsoc.microsemi.com/outgoing/core-image-minimal-dev-icicle-kit-es-sd-20201009141623.rootfs.wic.gz
82 $ gunzip core-image-minimal-dev-icicle-kit-es-sd-20201009141623.rootfs.wic.gz
83 $ qemu-img resize core-image-minimal-dev-icicle-kit-es-sd-20201009141623.rootfs.wic 4G
85 Then we can boot the machine by:
89 $ qemu-system-riscv64 -M microchip-icicle-kit -smp 5 \
90 -bios path/to/hss.bin -sd path/to/sdcard.img \
91 -nic user,model=cadence_gem \
92 -nic tap,ifname=tap,model=cadence_gem,script=no \
93 -display none -serial stdio \
94 -chardev socket,id=serial1,path=serial1.sock,server=on,wait=on \
95 -serial chardev:serial1
97 With above command line, current terminal session will be used for the first
98 serial port. Open another terminal window, and use ``minicom`` to connect the
103 $ minicom -D unix\#serial1.sock
105 HSS output is on the first serial port (stdio) and U-Boot outputs on the
106 second serial port. U-Boot will automatically load the Linux kernel from
112 Sometimes we just want to test booting a new kernel, and transforming the
113 kernel image to the format required by the HSS bootflow is tedious. We can
114 use '-kernel' for direct kernel booting just like other RISC-V machines do.
116 In this mode, the OpenSBI fw_dynamic BIOS image for 'generic' platform is
117 used to boot an S-mode payload like U-Boot or OS kernel directly.
119 For example, the following commands show building a U-Boot image from U-Boot
120 mainline v2021.07 for the Microchip Icicle Kit board:
124 $ export CROSS_COMPILE=riscv64-linux-
125 $ make microchip_mpfs_icicle_defconfig
127 Then we can boot the machine by:
131 $ qemu-system-riscv64 -M microchip-icicle-kit -smp 5 -m 2G \
132 -sd path/to/sdcard.img \
133 -nic user,model=cadence_gem \
134 -nic tap,ifname=tap,model=cadence_gem,script=no \
135 -display none -serial stdio \
136 -kernel path/to/u-boot/build/dir/u-boot.bin \
137 -dtb path/to/u-boot/build/dir/u-boot.dtb
141 * Check the "stdout-path" property in the /chosen node in the DTB to determine
142 which serial port is used for the serial console, e.g.: if the console is set
143 to the second serial port, change to use "-serial null -serial stdio".
144 * The default U-Boot configuration uses CONFIG_OF_SEPARATE hence the ELF image
145 ``u-boot`` cannot be passed to "-kernel" as it does not contain the DTB hence
146 ``u-boot.bin`` has to be used which does contain one. To use the ELF image,
147 we need to change to CONFIG_OF_EMBED or CONFIG_OF_PRIOR_STAGE.
149 .. _HSS: https://github.com/polarfire-soc/hart-software-services