Running Linux on i.MX RT1170 in 5 Minutes

Owned by Natalia Sofronova
Last updated: Jun 27, 2024Version comment
11 min read

1. Hardware Setup

Prepare hardware as described below:

  1. Connect the microUSB cable to the J11 connector on the MIMXRT1170-EVK board and the development host to provide the serial console access, which is required to run Linux (uClinux) on the i.MX RT1170. The serial console operates in U-Boot and uCLinux with the following parameters:

    • Baud rate - 115200

    • Data bits - 8

    • Stop bits - 1

    • Parity - none

  2. Connect Ethernet cable to the J1 connector on the MIMXRT1170-EVK board.

  3. The MicroUSB SD Card used to boot the system on the MIMXRT1170-EVK board.
    Since U‑Boot (SPL+TPL) + U‑Boot environment are located at the 0x400..0x100000 range of the raw SD Card address-space, the SD Card must be partitioned properly, so that U‑Boot does not overwrite the file system on the partition. The SD Card must contain at least one partition started at a at least 1MB raw offset. The partition must be FATFS-formatted. Usually, a new SD Card satisfies these requirements by default so most likely no special preparations are required unless the card has been reformatted in some other way in other projects.

2. Installing Linux to NXP i.MX RT1170 EVK Board

  1. Download the bootable U‑Boot and Linux images from the Emcraft web site:

    where SPL is the U‑Boot SPL prebuilt image; u-boot.img is the U‑Boot TPL prebuilt image; rootfs.uImage is the prebuilt rootfs project image.

  2. Plug in the MicroSD card to the cross-development host.

  3. Find out a /dev/sdX device the system has assigned to your SD Card:

    $ dmesg | tail [ 456.470775] usbcore: registered new interface driver usb-storage [ 456.482079] usbcore: registered new interface driver uas [ 457.501716] scsi 3:0:0:0: Direct-Access Generic STORAGE DEVICE 0821 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6 [ 457.508132] sd 3:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0 [ 457.715113] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] 15446016 512-byte logical blocks: (7.91 GB/7.37 GiB) [ 457.733992] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off [ 457.733999] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 23 00 00 00 [ 457.753808] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Write cache: disabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA [ 457.840489] sdb: sdb1 [ 457.840845] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk

  4. Install U‑Boot to the microSD card:

    $ sudo dd if=SPL of=/dev/sdX bs=1k seek=1 conv=notrunc; sync $ sudo dd if=u-boot.img of=/dev/sdb bs=1k seek=128 conv=notrunc; sync

  5. Install the rootfs project to the microSD card:

    $ sudo mount /dev/sdX /mnt $ cp roofts.uImage /mnt

  6. Set Boot SW1 as 0010 and SW2.7, insert the micro SD card in the board and power the board. The system should boot up on the board:

3. Ethernet Driver Support

  1. Power cycle the board. While U‑Boot is coming up, press any key on the serial console to enter the U‑Boot command line interface:

  2. From the U‑Boot command line interface, reset to the default environment:

  3. Set the ipaddr, serverip and netmask U‑Boot environment variables:

  4. ping the development host from the target board:

  5. Load rootfs.uImage using the U‑Boot tftp command:

  6. Reset the board and let it boot up to the Linux shell:

  7. From the development host validate that the target board is visible using ping:

  8. From the target board, validate that the development host is visible using ping:

4. TCP/IP Stack Support

With uClinux running on the i.MX RT1170, you get the full Linux TCP/IP stack TCP/IP stack (kernel version 6.1.22). Userspace POSIX APIs are provided by the uClibc library. Key user-space networking tools and utilities are available from the multi-call busybox. Additional tools and packages, such as for instance the SSH dropbear server, can be built specifically for uClinux. All in all, you have the powerful Linux TCP/IP stack at your disposal.

  1. From the development host validate that the i.MX RT1170 is visible using ping:

  2. ping the development host from the i.MX RT1170:

  3. On the target, start the telnetd daemon to allow connections to the i.MX RT1170:

  4. Connect to the target from the development host using telnet. The target is configured to accept the 123 password for root:

  5. The dropbear SSH daemon starts automatically on the target. Verify that dropbear allows secure connections to the target:

  6. Connect to the target from the development host using ssh. The first connection takes several seconds to establish as the i.MX RT1170 runs computation-extensive key calculations. Again, enter 123 on the password prompt:

  7. On the target, enable access to the Internet by configuring a default gateway. Note also that the system makes use of the public name server provided by Google:

  8. Use ntpd to synchronize the time on the target with the time provided by a public server:

  9. Use wget to download a file from a remote server:

  10. Start the HTTP daemon:

  11. From a local host, open a Web browser to the i.MX RT1170 and watch the demo web page provided by the target. The i.MX RT1170 shows the current time and date as well as the list of the currently running processes:

    image-20240627-141657.png

  12. Mount a directory exported by a development host over NFS:

5. Support USB Host Stack Interface

  1. Attach a USB Flash device to the USB1 or USB2 connector. Verify that it is automatically detected and can be mounted:

  2. Unmount the USB Flash device:

6. Support Loading / Unloading Kernel Modules

  1. From the Linux shell, load the demo kernel module:

  2. Show the status of the loaded kernel modules:

  3. Unload the module from the Linux kernel:

7. Running GUI Demo

Step through the following procedure to run the GUI demo, LVGL widgets example:

  1. From the Linux shell, type the widgets_gui_demo command to run the widgets demo:

  2. Make sure the demo appears on the LCD:

    image-20240627-141834.png

  3. Use touch panel to validate various GUI controls provided by the demo: