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. Then a kernel can be loaded from U-Boot. It also supports direct kernel booting via the -kernel option along with the device tree blob via -dtb. When direct kernel boot is used, the OpenSBI fw_dynamic BIOS image is used to boot a payload like U-Boot or OS kernel directly.

The user provided DTB should have the following requirements:

- The /cpus node should contain at least one subnode for E51 and the number of subnodes should match QEMU’s `-smp` option

- The /memory reg size should match QEMU’s selected ram_size via `-m`

- Should contain a node for the CLINT device with a compatible string “riscv,clint0”

QEMU follows below truth table to select which payload to execute:

-bios | -kernel | -dtb | payload
--- | --- | --- | ---
N | N | don’t care | HSS
Y | don’t care | don’t care | HSS
N | Y | Y | kernel

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.

## Running HSS

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.

## Direct Kernel Boot

Sometimes we just want to test booting a new kernel, and transforming the kernel image to the format required by the HSS bootflow is tedious. We can use ‘-kernel’ for direct kernel booting just like other RISC-V machines do.

In this mode, the OpenSBI fw_dynamic BIOS image for ‘generic’ platform is used to boot an S-mode payload like U-Boot or OS kernel directly.

For example, the following commands show building a U-Boot image from U-Boot mainline v2021.07 for the Microchip Icicle Kit board:

    $ export CROSS_COMPILE=riscv64-linux-
    $ make microchip_mpfs_icicle_defconfig

Then we can boot the machine by:

    $ qemu-system-riscv64 -M microchip-icicle-kit -smp 5 -m 2G \
        -sd path/to/sdcard.img \
        -nic user,model=cadence_gem \
        -nic tap,ifname=tap,model=cadence_gem,script=no \
        -display none -serial stdio \
        -kernel path/to/u-boot/build/dir/u-boot.bin \
        -dtb path/to/u-boot/build/dir/u-boot.dtb

CAVEATS:

- Check the “stdout-path” property in the /chosen node in the DTB to determine which serial port is used for the serial console, e.g.: if the console is set to the second serial port, change to use “-serial null -serial stdio”.

- The default U-Boot configuration uses CONFIG_OF_SEPARATE hence the ELF image `u-boot` cannot be passed to “-kernel” as it does not contain the DTB hence `u-boot.bin` has to be used which does contain one. To use the ELF image, we need to change to CONFIG_OF_EMBED or CONFIG_OF_PRIOR_STAGE.