Yocto production release for PicoCore i.MX8ULP

As you may know, the boot process of 64-bit-ARM CPUs is much more complicated. When using NXPs boot process (like in the pre-release), a lot of board-specific information like DRAM timings, has to be compiled into the source code. This would require a seperate bootloader for every board variant that we have, making our releases quite complicated. In addition, a lot of firmware images and other low-level stuff would have to be handled by the end customer.

So F&S has improved the boot process by introducing an intermediate bootloader layer called NBoot. This NBoot deals with all the low-level stuff and is already pre-installed on every shipped board. So like before on our i.MX6 boards, you just have to care about U-Boot an the Linux system.

All our boards based on i.MX8M CPU variants (MM, MN, MP) already use this NBoot based boot process. But on i.MX8ULP and i.MX93, the boot process is different. So at the moment we are porting NBoot to those new architectures. For i.MX93, this is already done and the next release will be based on NBoot. There are still some other things to do (Secure Boot, FreeRTOS, etc), but the release is not too far away. So right now we are porting NBoot to ULP, which works rather similar. So a rough guess would be to have a final i.MX8ULP release in October or November.

Your F&S Support Team

Is there any information about the new release?

Hello Gordon ,

A full fsimx93 release will be available this week.

Based on its software status, a fsimx8ulp main release is being prepared and tested.

A main release for fsimx8ulp is therefore expected to be available in mid-September.

For development purposes, however, you can rely on release Y2024.12, as it already uses kernel 6.6 and Yocto 5.0.

Therefore, no API/ABI changes are to be expected in the libraries.

PS: An additional pre-release for fsimx8ulp is expected to be released sometime this week or next week, which will provide support for new OSM8ULP modules.