Qualcomm Robotics RB5/RB6 - Flashing Bootloader

Qualcomm Robotics RB5/RB6
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SoM Overview Carrier Boards Qualcomm Robotics RB5 developer kit Qualcomm Robotics RB6 platform
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Boot Devices Thundercomm SDK Downloading SDK Installing SDK Generating Image and flashing Linaro Getting Started Flashing Bootloader Flashing Boot Image and Rootfs Special / Debug Modes Setting up board in EDL Mode Setting up board in Fastboot Mode
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In this section, we will cover how to flash the Linux Bootloader in the Qualcomm Robotics RB5/RB6. With the Bootloader flashed, you will then be able to flash the Boot image and rootfs. We will cover two ways to flash the bootloader, the first one is with the board in EDL Mode and the second one with Fastboot mode. For both, we assume that you already have the bootloader downloaded and fastboot set up on your host computer, if not please check our Getting Started section.

Using EDL Mode

The following steps will show how to flash the bootloader in your board using the EDL Mode. For this reason, please check our Setting up board in EDL mode section to set your board, if it is not set the steps will not work. These steps also assume you have the Linaro QDL flashing tools. If not, please check you have the tools by checking our Getting Started section. The following steps are done in your host computer.

Note

The bootloader should be named like: rb5-bootloader-ufs-linux-XX.zip. XX represents the release number.

1. Open a terminal and go to the directory where you downloaded the bootloader.

2. Unzip your bootloader zip file.

unzip rb5-bootloader-ufs-linux-XX.zip

3. Enter the directory

cd rb5-bootloader-ufs-linux-XX

4. Run the following command, this will allow the host computer to send commands to write into the onboard storage (UFS).

Note

Output of the command will not be exactly the same.

user@desktop:~/work/QRB5_Exploration/Linaro/rb5-bootloader-ufs-linux-21$ qdl prog_firehose_ddr.elf rawprogram?.xml patch?.xml

The output of the above command should be similar to the following:

...
...
LOG: INFO: Calling handler for patch
LOG: INFO: Calling handler for setbootablestoragedrive
LOG: INFO: Using scheme of value= 1
partition 1 is now bootable
LOG: INFO: Calling handler for power
LOG: INFO: Will issue reset/power off 100 useconds, if this hangs check if watchdog is enabled
LOG: INFO: bsp_target_reset() 0

5. After finishing every step above, you can set your board in Fastboot mode to flash the boot image and rootfs. For this, check our Setting up board in Fastboot Mode section, and then come back to this section.

6. When you have your board in Fastboot mode, you can continue to the Flashing Boot Image and Rootfs section where we will cover how to flash the boot image and rootfs downloaded in the Getting Started section.

Using Fastboot Mode

The following steps will show how to flash the bootloader in your board using the Fastboot Mode. For this reason, please check our Setting up board in Fastboot mode section to set your board, if it is not set the steps will not work. These steps need to be done in your host computer.

Note

The bootloader should be named like: rb5-bootloader-ufs-linux-XX.zip. XX represents the release number.

1. Open a terminal and go to the directory where you downloaded the bootloader.

2. Unzip your bootloader zip file.

unzip rb5-bootloader-ufs-linux-XX.zip

3. Enter the directory.

cd rb5-bootloader-ufs-linux-XX

Note

This process can take up to 3min in a computer with processor Intel® Core™ i7-1065G7 CPU @ 1.30GHz × 8.

4. Execute the flashall script. This will automatically start flashing the bootloader to the UFS in the Qualcomm Robotics RB5/RB6.

sudo ./flashall

The above command should have and output similar to the following:

target reported max download size of 805306368 bytes
sending 'abl_a' (148 KB)...
OKAY [  0.022s]
writing 'abl_a'...
OKAY [  0.003s]
finished. total time: 0.025s

5. The bootloader should be flashed to the UFS by now. Continue with rebooting the board with the command below. Rebooting will make the board launch with the new bootloader, which will allow to flash the boot and rootfs images.

sudo fastboot reboot

Note

Do NOT set your board again in Fastboot Mode when flashing the boot and rootfs image.

6. Now, you can continue to our Flashing Boot Image and Rootfs section where we will cover how to flash the boot image and rootfs downloaded in the Getting Started section. You do NOT need to set your board again in Fastboot Mode since you already did it.