Introduction

DeveloperBox is a certified 96boards Enterprise Edition board. The board/SoC has: -

  • Socionext SC2A11 24-cores ARM Cortex-A53 on tbe Mini-ATX form factor motherboard

  • 4 DIMM slots (4GB DDR4-2400 UDIMM shipped by default)

  • 1 4xPCIe Gen2 slot and 2 1xPCIe Gen2 slots (1x slots are connected via PCIe bridge chip)

  • 4 USB-3.0 ports

  • 2 SATA ports

  • 1 GbE network port

  • 1 USB-UART serial port (micro USB)

  • 64MB SPI NOR Flash

  • 8GB eMMC Flash Storage

  • 96boards LS connector

The DeveloperBox schematic can be found here: - https://www.96boards.org/documentation/enterprise/developerbox/hardware-docs/mzsc2am_v03_20180115_a.pdf

And the other documents can be found here: - https://www.96boards.org/documentation/enterprise/developerbox/

Currently, the U-Boot port supports: -

  • USB

  • eMMC

  • SPI-NOR

  • SATA

  • GbE

The DeveloperBox boots the TF-A and EDK2 as a main bootloader by default. The DeveloperBox U-Boot port will replace the EDK2 and boot from TF-A as BL33, but no need to combine with it.

Compile from source

You can build U-Boot without any additinal source code.:

cd u-boot
export ARCH=arm64
export CROSS_COMPILE=aarch64-linux-gnu-
make SynQuacer_defconfig
make -j `noproc`

Then, expand the binary to 1MB for preparing flash.:

cp u-boot.bin SPI_NOR_UBOOT.fd
truncate -s 1M SPI_NOR_UBOOT.fd

Installation

You can install the SNI_NOR_UBOOT.fd via NOR flash writer.

Flashing the U-Boot image on DeveloperBox requires a 96boards UART mezzanine or other mezzanine which can connect to LS-UART0 port. Connect USB cable from host to the LS-UART0 and set DSW2-7 to ON, and turn the board on again. The flash writer program will be started automatically; don’t forget to turn the DSW2-7 off again after flashing.

!!CAUTION!! If you failed to write the U-Boot image on wrong address, the board can be bricked. See below page if you need to recover the bricked board. See the following page for more detail

https://www.96boards.org/documentation/enterprise/developerbox/installation/board-recovery.md.html

When the serial flasher is running correctly is will show the following boot messages shown via LS-UART0:

/*------------------------------------------*/
/*  SC2A11 "SynQuacer" series Flash writer  */
/*                                          */
/*  Version: cd254ac                        */
/*  Build: 12/15/17 11:25:45                */
/*------------------------------------------*/

Command Input >

Once the flasher tool is running we are ready flash the UEFI image:

flash rawwrite 200000 100000
>> Send SPI_NOR_UBOOT.fd via XMODEM (Control-A S in minicom) <<

!!NOTE!! The flasher command parameter is different from the command for board recovery. U-Boot uses the offset 200000 (2-five-0, 2M in hex) and the size 100000 (1-five-0, 1M in hex).

After transferring the SPI_NOR_UBOOT.fd, turn off the DSW2-7 and reset the board.