My only objective was to get my shiney new P550 to boot from USB.
It arrived in the plain cardboard box and was up and running with little
or no work at all. Mostly just plug the thing in and hook up some small
serial-to-USB cable thing. That works and it worked for about a week.
I made the mistake of trying to read some of the documentation
and then trying to boot a USB thumbdrive thing. Nothing fancy.
The board has never booted again.
I then called over some technical friends and we looked at the PDF
document with the promising title "Image Update Procedure for HF106
EIC7700 SoC Version 1.0". What is the HF106? What I have here is the
SiFive RISC-V P550. Regardless it seems to be about the P550 in spite
of the title. It is dated for the 4th of November 2024. Maybe it is correct?
I see that there was a new release of the data to re-flash the board today :
https://github.com/sifiveinc/freedom-u-sdk/releases
So I tried to follow the instructions for EsBurn. That tool is under the
Apache license but closed source?
Regardless I see the ttyUSB0 to ttyUSB3 on the "host" machine with the
USB cables plugged into the board. The EsBurn tool does not much :
# ./EsBurnTool -c config.ini
['dhcp 0x100000000 172.16.35.16:bootloader_ddr5_secboot.bin', 'es_burn write 0x100000000 flash', 'dhcp 0x100000000 172.16.35.16:boot.vfat', 'es_burn wboot 0x100000000 0x0 emmc', 'dhcp 0x100000000 172.16.35.16:demo-coreip-xfce4-hifive-premier-p550.rootfs.ext4', 'es_burn wroot 0x100000000 0x0 emmc']
start_tftpserver : /root/hf106/image
wait uboot boot
wait uboot timeout
#
There is no storage device /dev/sdb anywhere.
Here is the config.ini file :
# cat config.ini
[esburn config]
serial = /dev/ttyUSB2
# Whether to erase emmc partition table y/n
erase_partition = n
# User-specified tftp serverip
serverip = 172.16.35.16
directory = /root/hf106/image
bootloader = bootloader_ddr5_secboot.bin
# Incremental updates boot filesystem image name
bootfs = boot.vfat
# Incremental updates root filesystem image name
rootfs = demo-coreip-xfce4-hifive-premier-p550.rootfs.ext4
# We do not recommend that users modify the partition information
[mmc partition table]
par1 = boot,size=512MiB
par2 = swap,size=4096MiB
par3 = root,size=30GiB,uuid=b0f77ad6-36cd-4a99-a8c0-31d73649aa08
par4 = userdata,size=-
The files that I have :
# ls /root/hf106/image
bootloader_ddr5_secboot.bin
boot.vfat
demo-coreip-xfce4-hifive-premier-p550.rootfs.ext4.xz
#
I checked the SHA256 hash data :
# openssl dgst -sha256 -r /root/hf106/image/boot.vfat
763c92033923d2cc8cdd79f88f35a75af0aefb6fe28316999eb22b6712f12801 */root/hf106/image/boot.vfat
# openssl dgst -sha256 -r /root/hf106/image/bootloader_ddr5_secboot.bin
934a5da8b644d8ad0c14bc1bb6344c5b36b9a4b35ebda4f19bf79d95585572b5 */root/hf106/image/bootloader_ddr5_secboot.bin
# openssl dgst -sha256 -r /root/hf106/image/demo-coreip-xfce4-hifive-premier-p550.rootfs.ext4.xz
eb7d0124b300e409adf01d07fc306fae5df5f6fc66dbf1653b09f702621e1d4c */root/hf106/image/demo-coreip-xfce4-hifive-premier-p550.rootfs.ext4.xz
#
I checked the output from dmesg and it looks more or less correct for
the serial devices :
[ 4836.454182] usb 1-1: new high-speed USB device number 5 using xhci_hcd
[ 4836.602728] usb 1-1: New USB device found, idVendor=0403, idProduct=6011, bcdDevice= 8.00
[ 4836.602741] usb 1-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
[ 4836.602748] usb 1-1: Product: Quad RS232-HS
[ 4836.602753] usb 1-1: Manufacturer: FTDI
[ 4836.633556] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbserial_generic
[ 4836.633567] usbserial: USB Serial support registered for generic
[ 4836.642260] usbcore: registered new interface driver ftdi_sio
[ 4836.642352] usbserial: USB Serial support registered for FTDI USB Serial Device
[ 4836.642450] ftdi_sio 1-1:1.0: FTDI USB Serial Device converter detected
[ 4836.643269] usb 1-1: Detected FT4232H
[ 4836.644581] usb 1-1: FTDI USB Serial Device converter now attached to ttyUSB0
[ 4836.644734] ftdi_sio 1-1:1.1: FTDI USB Serial Device converter detected
[ 4836.644789] usb 1-1: Detected FT4232H
[ 4836.645037] usb 1-1: FTDI USB Serial Device converter now attached to ttyUSB1
[ 4836.645195] ftdi_sio 1-1:1.2: FTDI USB Serial Device converter detected
[ 4836.645250] usb 1-1: Detected FT4232H
[ 4836.645455] usb 1-1: FTDI USB Serial Device converter now attached to ttyUSB2
[ 4836.645613] ftdi_sio 1-1:1.3: FTDI USB Serial Device converter detected
[ 4836.645671] usb 1-1: Detected FT4232H
[ 4836.645786] usb 1-1: FTDI USB Serial Device converter now attached to ttyUSB3
#
Not sure why the board is dead and can not be flashed. Is there better
documentation anywhere?
I can recognize AI garbage instantly. This is trash.
Regardless I have the P550 running smoothly with the experimental and strange
release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10. Which is weird and wonky but it sort
of works. Badly.
The real challenge is to get Gentoo Linux on this board. I can build all that
I really need from sources just fine. Up until we need to boot. Then all goes
to hell. I will open a whole other forum post about Gentoo Linux on the P550.