Release notes for the M5253DEMO BSP Released: Feb. 08, 2010 This is a release of the Freescale Semiconductor M5253DEMO Linux BSP. The default configurations of this BSP has been tested and all features are believed to be functioning correctly except as noted in this document. If you find an issue, please report it to www.freescale.com for validation. The following hardware is supported: MCF5253 processor on the M5253DEMO development board. For configuration information, please see /Help/software/M5253DEMO/User_Manual_M5253DEMO.pdf on the BSP CD image. ========================================================= SUPPORTED FEATURES IN THIS RELEASE ========================================================= Processor Features: * ColdFire V2 Core at 140MHz * Enhanced MAC module * 16 KB I/D-Cache * 128 KB SRAM * Integrated peripherals o Two UARTs (Only 2 are supported) o 4 DMA Channels o I2C Bus Interface o uDMA controller o Real Time Clock o 2 CANbus ports o USB o 2 Timers o SSI o Audio o 8M on-board flash o ATA (PIO and uDMA) o Ethernet through off-chip DM9000 interface Kernel Features: - Linux-2.6.29 kernel u-boot 2009.08 GNU gcc 4.4.1, uclibc 0.9.53, binutils-2.19.51.20090709, and elf2flt. GDB 6.8.50.20090630 Userspace packages highlights: * busybox * mtd-utils * gdbserver * strace * i2c-tools * tone * vplay ============================================================= CFFlasher Information ============================================================= This CFFlasher setup procedure will help users reinstall the u-boot bootloader. Included in this BSP is a u-boot binary needed to restore the bootloader firmware. You have to use **Windows** to run the CFFlasher software. 1) Install the CFFlasher software. That code is not included in this BSP and should be downloaded from the Freescale website. http://www.freescale.com/coldfire 2) Click on the CFflasher icon and follow the instructions to start the software. 3) With power off on the target board, connect a host USB port to the USB P&E micro interface - the J11 connector. 4) Select the appropriate "Target Config" settings. 5) Select the "Program" option and navigate to the /images/M5253DEMO/u-boot.bin file or to a user built bootloader in /rootfs/boot/u-boot.bin. After selecting the "Program" button, a progess bar should be displayed on the screen. 6) Power down and remove the cable. When you power on the board again the u-boot headers and prompt should be displayed on a terminal set to 115200 8N1. 7) Follow the u-boot setup procedures in the User's Manual. ============================================================= KNOWN ISSUES ============================================================= System limitations: ------------------- 1) There is a limited amount of RAM (16M) available on this system. Running memory intensive programs repeatedly will likely fragment the limited memory resources available. Care must be excersized when writing programs or scripts for this platform. Allocating large chunks of memory (>1M) should be avoided. 2) Processes involving large files may fail and cause a kernel core dump. This has to do with the memory fragmentation issue. If you see a kernel core dump message that includes something similar to the following line: ... Allocation of length 559231 from process 357 failed DMA per-cpu: ... The memory is fragmented and cannot be recovered. Review the existing system and try to limit processes and reduce the system size by disabling unused device drivers and packages. For the reason mentioned above, The hotplug in kernel and mdev in the filesystem were disabled by default. The static device table was used in the system. The syslogd/klogd, mdev and boa were not enabled in the ltib. ATA: ---- 3) The INTRQ line is pulled high when it should be low. R149 should be pulled to ground instead of VCC. You need to make this hardware change or you will get an "irq 147" error message. 4) There is not enough internal ATA/USB(DMA) memory for both devices. The default has the ATA in PIO mode. RTC: ---- 5) There is no battery backup for the RTC. The date is lost after power is turned off. USB: ---- 6) The USB controller on the MCF5253 cannot access system memory directly. The controller can only access a 16 KiB static ram area (also called ATA/USB cache memory) that's part of the SoC. The static ram area must hold all of the controller's data structures plus incoming and outgoing data buffers. Because of this, there are several restrictions on the USB. - The cache area is also used by the ATA DMA controller, and because of its limited size USB and ATA cannot be used at the same time. - Several drivers require many pre-allocated buffers, which are too large to fit into the static ram. These drivers are not supported. An example is the asix ethernet driver. - There is a performance impact, since data must be copied to and from system memory to the cache for each I/O. - On-the-Go mode is not supported because the cache area cannot simultaneously hold the structures and data for host and gadget modes. 7) The removable USB device could not be able to be auto-mounted after plug-in, and the USB host could not automount a usb flash drive for the System limitations mentioned in item 1). The auto-mount feature for the system is default disabled on the system. 8) When reading some of the old 64M u-disk, there may have some USB reset issue. SD/MMC: -------- 9) There is hardware limitation, so SD/MMC driver could not support MMCPlus mass storage device. 10) The card should be installed in the SD slot before the SD driver running Netperf: -------- 11) The netperf executable does not operate correctly on the target. Netserver does not operate correctly. Run netserver on the host and netperf on the target. filesystem: ---------- 12) The following packages can be enabled on the M5253board: samba client tar unzip which boa busybox dev gdb tools skell strace fake provides sysconfig zlib hotplug bash modeps LZO ntpclient AppTRK mtd-utils play vplay i2c-tools But there are very small size(16M) memory on the board, to boot up the board smoothly, only the basic filesystem(busbox) can be defaultly enabled in ltib, Otherwise, there will be some OOM(out of memory) error. U-boot: ---------- 13) The NOR Flash cannot be erased correctly if try to erase the whole 8MB NOR Flash in one time in U-Boot. The solution is to erase the Flash less than 8MB each time with multiple times.