programming-the-spi-flash-on-a-polarfire-soc-board-and-booting-via-hss.md

Programming the SPI Flash on a PolarFire SoC Board and Booting via HSS

Table of Contents

• Programming the SPI Flash on a PolarFire SoC Board and Booting via HSS
  • Table of Contents
  • Introduction
  • Requirements
    • Tested on
    • Pre-Requisites
  • Build the HSS
  • Use Libero to program the SPI flash

Introduction

This document provides a brief overview of programming the System Controller SPI flash part on a PolarFire SoC board with a HSS-compatible payload, and booting it via the HSS.

Please refer to the PolarFire SoC Microprocessor Subsystem (MSS) User Guide for a detailed description of PolarFire SoC.

Requirements

A PolarFire SoC board with a SPI part connected to System Controller SPI flash interface is required to follow the steps outlined in this document.

Tested on

The steps outlined in this document have been tested on a PolarFire SoC Icicle Kit.

Pre-Requisites

Ensure you are using the latest version of the Icicle Kit Reference Design when following these steps.

Build the HSS

Clone the Hart Software Services repository

$ git clone https://github.com/polarfire-soc/hart-software-services.git

Copy the default configuration for your board. For example:

$ cd hart-software-services
$ cp boards/mpfs-icicle-kit-es/def_config .config

Edit the default HSS configuration using menuconfig command as shown below:

$ make menuconfig

After running the command shown above, a configuration menu should pop-up.

Navigate to the "Services" category

Select the "Boot from System Controller SPI flash support" option by pressing the space/enter button

Exit menuconfig by pressing the "Q" in the keyboard and save the configuration when prompted

Build the HSS using the make command as shown below. Alternatively, build the HSS using Softconsole as shown in the "Building the HSS using SoftConsole" section of this document.

$ make

Flash the HSS to your board from the command line using the command shown below. Alternatively, use the SoftConsole GUI as shown in the "Programming the eNVM" section of this document.

$ make program

From either Buildroot or Yocto, you should have a payload.bin file which contains U-Boot. Convert this to HEX using

$ bincopy convert -i binary -o ihex payload.bin payload.hex

If you don't have bincopy installed, install it with pip (or pip3, whichever you have):

$ sudo pip install bincopy

Use Libero to program the SPI flash

Clone the Icicle Kit reference design (git clone https://github.com/polarfire-soc/icicle-kit-reference-design.git) and Open Libero. Either click Project→Execute Script (or press CTRL-u) to get the Execute Script dialog, and click "..." to select the Icicle Kit reference design Tcl script:

Click Run to generate the project.

Select the "Design Flow" tab, and then run the "Generate FPGA Array Data" tool to synthesize the design.

This will take some time, but the next tool in the flow depends on the output of "Generate FPGA Array Data" and it won't run it automatically.

Open the "Configure Design Initialization Data and Memories" tool.

Select the "SPI Flash" tab, and change the SPI Flash memory size to 1,048,576 KiB.

Click "Add, and add a "Data Storage Client". Give your payload a meaningful and representative name (call it "payload" if you're stuck), select "Memory file" and click "..." to select your payload.hex image from earlier.

The Start address offset of 0x400 is important -- do not change that.

Next, start the "Run PROGRAM_SPI_IMAGE Action" tool.

Click "Yes" to both the Warning dialog and the Information dialog

This will take a minute or two.

Power-cycle the board, and watch the boot messages.