Architectures/ARM/Snowball

The Snowball board is a tiny energy-efficient but surprisingly complete development board from Calao Systems. Although the board is discontinued, there are still a good thousand boards in stock. In Europe these boards can be obtained (with a minimum order of 5 pieces) for around €40,= including shipping, making them an interesting alternative to the Raspberry Pi. With a dual-core ARM Cortex A9 processor the processing capabilities can be up to 6 times as high as the RPi.

Some of the boards features: 1GB of RAM, 4GB (SDK) or 8GB(PDK) storage on-board (eMMC), 10/100 ethernet, on-board Wifi-Bluetooth-GPS(full version), HDMI out and several other connectors including audio, uSD, serial console over USB. When the radio functions are not required, it can be powered over a standard USB port, otherwise an external 5V adapter is required.

Purpose of this page

This wiki page documents the work-in-progress on making Linux, and Fedora in particular, run on the Calao Snowball board. In particular this should cover technical documentation and notes about the eMMC flashing tool, the U-boot boot loader and the Linux kernel plus device drivers.

Eventually this work should lead to a single Fedora image that can be uploaded to the eMMC containing a fresh U-boot, a recent kernel containing many OSS drivers and a user-space useful and expandable in the Fedora fashion. Reaching this final goal depends on the redistributability of the boot-loader binaries provided by ST-Ericsson, which I currently treat as a later concern. If no complete image could be provided due to licensing constraints, at least we should aim for good installation instructions.

Riff

The Snowball board contains an embedded 8GB MMC chip, or eMMC, that off-the-shelve contains several first-stage bootloader binaries, U-Boot 2009.11, and a Linaro 11.09 installation. The eMMC can be overwritten either from inside the system, or externally through a USB cable using the Riff tool.

Compilation is a bit painful by default, because the tool is abandoned and designed with a different distro in mind. Specific problems include expectations on the filenames for Xalan-j2, a seemingly non-working install make target and poor instructions in the README files.

Todo
- Document how to build Riff for Fedora - Provide a spec-file and/or RPM for Riff

U-Boot

U-boot is situated on the eMMC at offset 0x120000. Riff can be used to write a new build of the bootloader to this address. The size of U-boot is stored in a 4-byte integer at 0x200a4. Upstream U-Boot can be used on the Snowball board, but loading a kernel from the eMMC does not work due to a regression introduced in:

e95504497ecac46907204b0ee3460b708a2981ac mmc: Split device init to decouple OCR-polling delay

Reverting this commit makes U-boot work. By default the upstream U-boot has no support for Device Tree or network boot. The latter is supported by the preloaded image.

Todo - upstream work
- Fix the above commit for Snowball

- Enable FDT support in U-boot for Snowball

- Enable networking support in U-boot for Snowball

Kernel and drivers

Todo
This list is not complete

Component	Purpose	Module	Works	Upstream kernel	FDT	Firmware required?	Notes
U8500	CPU	dbx500-cpufreq	-	X	X		loop delay calibration fails, boot with lpj=7970816
		pmu-a9	X	X	X
	DMA	dma40	X	X	?
	AMBA SSP	ssp-pl022	X	X	?
AB8500 RTC	Real-time clock	rtc-ab8500		X	X
AB8500	Thermal sensor	ab8500		X	X
UART	Serial port	amba-pl011		X	X
L310	L2 Cache	l2x0	X	X	X
Nomadik I2C	I2C	nmk-i2c	X	X	X
L138 USB OHCI	USB Host	db8500-musb		X	X
ARM Mali	GPU	lima					No DRM driver yet
AV8100	HDMI output	av8100_hdmi				X	Needs port to DRM
?	CVBS output
PL180	(e)MMC	mmci		X	X
SMC9115	Ethernet	smc911x		X	X		Odd MMIO layout, register location shifted Powered on by U-Boot
CW1200	Wifi	cw1200		X		X	GPIO 170 powers it on
CG2900	Bluetooth+GPS	cg2900
MOP500	Audio	snd-soc-mop500		X	X
LP5521	LED driver
LSM 303DLH	Accelerometer/Magnometer			-

This wiki page has a lot more info on the "smaller" devices on this board (sensors, GPIO ports, LED drivers..)