Apalis iMX8QM No U-Boot Console

I have an Apalis iMX8QM and Ixora V1.1 and cannot get the U-Boot console to come up when I power it on. I have verified that the particular Ixora board works with an i.MX6 but I get no serial output when I put in the i.MX 8 card. I have run into something similar in the past with an i.MX 6 and it turns out that it was in recovery mode and I had to use the easy installer to get it out. Is there a similiar tool/process for getting an i.MX 8 out of recovery mode?

And you did insert a properly prepared SD card it will boot off of? The recovery mode tooling is not ready yet, this especially with upcoming further boot ROM changes as announced by NXP in the next die/silicon revision. And keep in mind that the early access modules did ship as a kit only to be used in resp. special Ixora/Apalis Evaluation board it came with.

I had the same problem. With the SD card put in the correct slot (the 8 Bit one) the board starts up with console messages on the USB console.

Exactly, the early access Apalis iMX8QM will only boot from SD card.

Thanks for your feedback.

Based off this answer, I re-imaged the SD card and got it working. Not sure why it randomly stopped working but it seems to be stable now.

Perfect. Thanks for letting us know.

I just received my iMX8QM board with Ixora carrier and I am a bit confused. I can’t find u-boot on the SD card and I wonder why u-boot is not executed if SD card is not connected. Thanks in advance for your help.

Currently the module is fused to boot from sd card, so thats why no U-Boot is executed when there is no SD card present in the carrier board.

Thank you for your reply. But just to clarify: U-Boot is not on the SD card, right? Is it in the eMMC memory? Is there any document I can read on that. Thank you in advance.

Of course, U-Boot, as well as everything else, is on the SD card. Early access samples, while they do have an eMMC assembled, are really strapped to boot exclusively from the SD card only.

Subsequent sample versions as well as production versions will be strapped to use the boot configuration fused into the eFuses which will be set to exclusively boot from eMMC only.

Thanks for explanation, really appreciate it. On the SD card shipped with the developement sample I can’t see the u-boot binary image. Could you please tell me which file is the u-boot file? Thank you

According to the NXP reference manual, the A0 silicon boot ROM expects it at an offset of 0x8400 which is why the regular partitions do not start before 0x800000.