Arm Juno development platform

The Juno development board is an open, vendor-neutral, Armv8-A development platform, made by Arm Ltd. It is part of the Versatile Express family. There are three revisions of the board:

  • Juno r0, with two Cortex-A57 and four Cortex-A53 cores, without PCIe.

  • Juno r1, with two Cortex-A57 and four Cortex-A53 cores, in later silicon revisions, and with PCIe slots, Gigabit Ethernet and two SATA ports.

  • Juno r2, with two Cortex-A72 and four Cortex-A53 cores, otherwise the same as r1.

Among other things, the motherboard contains a management controller (MCC), an FPGA providing I/O interfaces (IOFPGA) and 64MB of NOR flash. The provided platform devices resemble the VExpress peripherals. The actual SoC also contains a Cortex-M3 based System Control Processor (SCP). The V2M-Juno TRM contains more technical details.

U-Boot build

There is only one defconfig and one binary build that covers all three board revisions, so to generate the needed u-boot.bin:

$ make vexpress_aemv8a_juno_defconfig
$ make

The automatic distro boot sequence looks for UEFI boot applications and boot.scr scripts on various boot media, starting with USB, then on disks connected to the two SATA ports, PXE, DHCP and eventually on the NOR flash.

U-Boot installation

This assumes there is some firmware on the SD card or NOR flash (see below for more details). The U-Boot binary is included in the Trusted Firmware FIP image, so after building U-Boot, this needs to be repackaged or recompiled.

The NOR flash will be updated by the MCC, based on the content of a micro-SD card, which is exported as a USB mass storage device via the rear USB-B socket. So to access that SD card, connect a cable to some host computer, and mount the FAT16 partition of the UMS device. If there is no device, check the upper serial port for a prompt, and explicitly enable the USB interface:

Cmd> usb_on
Enabling debug USB...

Repackaging an existing FIP image

To prevent problems, it is probably a good idea to backup the existing firmware, for instance by just copying the entire SOFTWARE/ directory, or at least the current fip.bin, beforehand.

To just replace the BL33 image in the exising FIP image, you can use fiptool from the Trusted Firmware repository, on the image file:

git clone https://git.trustedfirmware.org/TF-A/trusted-firmware-a.git
cd trusted-firmware-a
make fiptool
tools/fiptool/fiptool update --nt-fw=/path/to/your/u-boot.bin /mnt/juno/SOFTWARE/fip.bin

Unmount the USB mass storage device and reboot the board, the new fip.bin will be automatically written to the NOR flash and then used.

Rebuilding Trusted Firmware

You can also generate a new FIP image by compiling Arm Trusted Firmware, and providing u-boot.bin as the BL33 file. For that you can either build the required SCP firmware yourself, or just extract the existing version from your fip.bin, using fiptool (see above):

mkdir /tmp/juno; cd /tmp/juno
fiptool unpack /mnt/juno/SOFTWARE/fip.bin

Then build TF-A:

git clone https://git.trustedfirmware.org/TF-A/trusted-firmware-a.git
cd trusted-firmware-a
make CROSS_COMPILE=aarch64-linux-gnu- PLAT=juno DEBUG=1 \
SCP_BL2=/tmp/juno/scp-fw.bin BL33=/path/to/your/u-boot.bin fiptool all fip
cp build/juno/debug/bl1.bin build/juno/debug/fip.bin /mnt/juno/SOFTWARE

Then umount the USB device, and reboot, as above.

Device trees

The device tree files for the boards are maintained in the Linux kernel repository. They end up in the SOFTWARE/ directory of the SD card, as juno.dtb, juno-r1.dtb, and juno-r2.dtb, respectively. The MCC firmware will look into the images.txt file matching the board revision, from the SITE1/ directory. Each version there will reference its respective DTB file in SOFTWARE/, and so the correct version will end in the NOR flash, in the board.dtb partition. U-Boot picks its control DTB from there, you can pass this on to a kernel using $fdtcontroladdr.

You can update the DTBs anytime, by building them using the dtbs make target from a Linux kernel tree, then just copying the generated binaries to the SOFTWARE/ directory of the SD card.