AN 796: Cyclone® V and Arria® V SoC Device Design Guidelines

ID 683360
Date 3/30/2022
Public
Document Table of Contents

5.1.6. Choosing Boot Loader Software

The Cyclone® V / Arria® V SoC boot flow includes the following stages:
  1. Boot ROM
  2. Preloader
  3. Bootloader
  4. Real-time operating system or bare-metal application
Figure 14.  Cyclone® V / Arria® V SoC Boot Flow

The BootROM and Preloader stages are needed for all Cyclone® V SoC / Arria® V SoC applications. U-boot and Linux are used by the GSRD, but a custom application may implement a different flow, such as using the Preloader to load a bare-metal application directly.

Typically, the main responsibilities of the Preloader are:
  • Perform additional HPS initialization
  • Bring up SDRAM
  • Load the next boot stage from Flash to SDRAM and jump to it
Currently, two different Preloader options are available:
  • SPL - part of U-Boot. Provided with SoC EDS under GPL (Open Source) License
  • MPL - provided with SoC EDS as an example using the HWLibs (bare-metal libraries). Uses BSD license.
Note: The Preloader requires a special header to be placed at the beginning of the next stage boot image. Also, the header contains a CRC value used to validate the image. The header can be attached to an image by using the mkimage utility that is included with SoC EDS.

The Bootloader has typical responsibilities that are similar with the Preloader, except it does not need to bring up SDRAM. Because the Bootloader is already residing in SDRAM, it is not limited by the size of the OCRAM. Therefore, it can provide a lot of features, such as network stack support.

A typical HPS system had numbers of registers that need to be set for a given configuration of the MPU subsystem, the network-on-chip interconnect component, the SDRAM memory, flash boot source and peripheral interfaces. The settings used for boot or initialization purposes are encapsulated in the following places:
  • RBF File(s) - containing register settings for SDRAM also dedicated I/O and FPGA pin configuration.
  • U-Boot source code - for rest of the settings
Figure 15. Preloader Build Flow
Note: It is highly recommended that Preloader is generated with bsp-editor. It is also recommended, although not required, to build U-Boot from the same source code.