Programming eMMC on i.MX6

This post intends to answer the question of programming the eMMC memory you can find on our Nitrogen6_MAX, Nit6_SoloX, Nit6X-SoMv2 and Nitrogen7 devices.Although there are many different approaches available based on Linux or the MFG Tools, this post will focus on two solutions provided under U-Boot.

Solution #1: Using U-Boot USB Mass Storage Gadget

This feature is fully explained here:

• u-boot-usb-mass-storage-gadget

Here is a quick summary:

• Plug a micro-USB cable from your host machine to the target
• Connect the board serial output (console) to your computer
  • On the host machine, start a terminal software such as minicom for Linux or TeraTerm for Windows
  • Set the connection baudrate to 115200 with no hardware flow control
• Power up the board and stop auto-boot process to get U-Boot prompt
  • Simply enter any character on the terminal software to stop auto-boot
• Enable the UMS Gadget for the eMMC

U-Boot > ums 0 mmc 1

• On the host machine, you should now see a new USB drive attached, you can now flash it
  • On Linux you can simply use the dd utility

~$ zcat .img.gz | sudo dd of=/dev/sdX bs=1M

• On Windows we recommend using Alex Page's USB Image Tool

Solution #2: Using U-Boot 'gzwrite' command

This feature is fully explained here:

• u-boot-gunzip-and-write-on-i-mx6

Here is a quick summary:

• Connect the board serial output (console) to your computer
  • On the host machine, start a terminal software such as minicom for Linux or TeraTerm for Windows
  • Set the connection baudrate to 115200 with no hardware flow control
• Power up the board and stop auto-boot process to get U-Boot prompt
  • Simply enter any character on the terminal software to stop auto-boot
• Load the gzipped image into RAM
  • This can be done by reading the image from USB, TFTP or MMC
  • Below is an example if the image is copied on a SDCard

U-Boot > load mmc 0 10008000 my.img.gz

• Once loaded, you can flash the image onto the eMMC

U-Boot > gzwrite mmc 1 10008000 0x$filesize 100000 0