Microchip PolarFire SoC Icicle Kit (microchip-icicle-kit) — QEMU documentation

# Microchip PolarFire SoC Icicle Kit (`microchip-icicle-kit`)

Microchip PolarFire SoC Icicle Kit integrates a PolarFire SoC, with one SiFive’s E51 plus four U54 cores and many on-chip peripherals and an FPGA.

For more details about Microchip PolarFire SoC, please see: https://www.microsemi.com/product-directory/soc-fpgas/5498-polarfire-soc-fpga

The Icicle Kit board information can be found here: https://www.microsemi.com/existing-parts/parts/152514

## Supported devices

The `microchip-icicle-kit` machine supports the following devices:

> - 1 E51 core

> - 4 U54 cores

> - Core Level Interruptor (CLINT)

> - Platform-Level Interrupt Controller (PLIC)

> - L2 Loosely Integrated Memory (L2-LIM)

> - DDR memory controller

> - 5 MMUARTs

> - 1 DMA controller

> - 2 GEM Ethernet controllers

> - 1 SDHC storage controller

## Boot options

The `microchip-icicle-kit` machine can start using the standard -bios functionality for loading its BIOS image, aka Hart Software Services (HSS). HSS loads the second stage bootloader U-Boot from an SD card. It does not support direct kernel loading via the -kernel option. One has to load kernel from U-Boot.

The memory is set to 1537 MiB by default which is the minimum required high memory size by HSS. A sanity check on ram size is performed in the machine init routine to prompt user to increase the RAM size to > 1537 MiB when less than 1537 MiB ram is detected.

## Boot the machine

HSS 2020.12 release is tested at the time of writing. To build an HSS image that can be booted by the `microchip-icicle-kit` machine, type the following in the HSS source tree:

    $ export CROSS_COMPILE=riscv64-linux-
    $ cp boards/mpfs-icicle-kit-es/def_config .config
    $ make BOARD=mpfs-icicle-kit-es

Download the official SD card image released by Microchip and prepare it for QEMU usage:

    $ wget ftp://ftpsoc.microsemi.com/outgoing/core-image-minimal-dev-icicle-kit-es-sd-20201009141623.rootfs.wic.gz
    $ gunzip core-image-minimal-dev-icicle-kit-es-sd-20201009141623.rootfs.wic.gz
    $ qemu-img resize core-image-minimal-dev-icicle-kit-es-sd-20201009141623.rootfs.wic 4G

Then we can boot the machine by:

    $ qemu-system-riscv64 -M microchip-icicle-kit -smp 5 \
        -bios path/to/hss.bin -sd path/to/sdcard.img \
        -nic user,model=cadence_gem \
        -nic tap,ifname=tap,model=cadence_gem,script=no \
        -display none -serial stdio \
        -chardev socket,id=serial1,path=serial1.sock,server=on,wait=on \
        -serial chardev:serial1

With above command line, current terminal session will be used for the first serial port. Open another terminal window, and use minicom to connect the second serial port.

    $ minicom -D unix\#serial1.sock

HSS output is on the first serial port (stdio) and U-Boot outputs on the second serial port. U-Boot will automatically load the Linux kernel from the SD card image.