HCL:SABRE Lite

SABRE Lite

The Sabre Lite, now known as BD-SL-i.MX6, is a low-cost development platform featuring the powerful i.MX 6 Quad applications processor. Products based on the Freescale SABRE (Smart Application Blueprint for Rapid Engineering) Lite platform for i.MX 6 applications processors enable cost-effective, rapid development of multimedia applications for Android® and Linux® operating systems.

Technical Data

Quad-Core ARM® Cortex A9 processor at 1GHz
1GByte of 64-bit wide DDR3 @ 532MHz
Three display ports (RGB, LVDS, and HDMI 1.4a)
Two camera ports (1xParallel, 1x MIPI CSI-2)
Multi-stream-capable HD video engine delivering H.264 1080p60 decode, 1080p30 encode and 3-D video playback in HD
Triple Play Graphics system consisting of a Quad-shader 3D unit capable of 200MT/s, and a separate 2-D and separate OpenVG Vertex acceleration engine for superior 3D, 2D and user interface acceleration
Serial ATA 2.5 (SATA) at 3Gbps
Dual SD 3.0/SDXC card slots
PCIe port (1 lane)
Analog (headphone/mic) and Digital (HDMI) audio
Compact size (3″x3″)
10/100/Gb Ethernet
10-pin JTAG interface
3 High speed USB ports (2xHost, 1xOTG)
1xCAN2 port
I2C
GPIOs
2MB Serial NOR Flash

More technical data (tests and configurations) on openSUSE:SABRE_Lite.

Writing a disk image to the SD card

Download the image you want (Leap is stable, Tumbleweed is rolling) from here:

Tumbleweed
JeOS image E20 image XFCE image LXQT image GNOME image KDE image X11 image

If the direct links above do not work for you, please check the general download directory for the images.

Leap-15.3
JeOS image E20 image XFCE image LXQT image GNOME image KDE image X11 image

If the direct links above do not work for you, please check the general download directory for the images.
As root extract the image onto your SD card (replace sdX with the device name of your SD card).
WARNING: all previous data on the SD card will be lost. Check first if the device you have selected is really your SD card!
```
 xzcat [image].raw.xz | dd bs=4M of=/dev/sdX iflag=fullblock oflag=direct; sync
```
Insert the SD card with the openSUSE image into your board.
Connect the board to your PC via serial port (optional, but helpful for debugging; USB-TTL serial cable needed).
Connect the board to your monitor (via DVI/HDMI, optional).
Power on the board.
Walk through the first boot steps.
Ethernet is configured to request an IP via DHCP, check your DHCP server for the board IP if used.
Have a lot of fun...

Default login is root:linux, works on serial console, via ssh, GUI.

The board will boot on internal SPI memory. Then you have to type some command to boot on SD3 or SD4 slot:

For SD3 :

 mw.l 0x020d8040 0x3040 && mw.l 0x020d8044 0x10000000
 reset

For uSD4 :

 mw.l 0x020d8040 0x3840 && mw.l 0x020d8044 0x10000000
 reset

See HCL:SABRE_Lite#Ease_boot_on_uSD4_or_SD3 below, to ease boot choice.

Ease boot on uSD4 or SD3

SABRE Lite board always boot on internal u-boot, stored in SPI flash. To ease your bootchoice, you can save new commands in internal u-boot:

 setenv boot_on_sd3 'mw.l 0x020d8040 0x3040 && mw.l 0x020d8044 0x10000000 && reset'
 setenv boot_on_usd4 'mw.l 0x020d8040 0x3840 && mw.l 0x020d8044 0x10000000 && reset'
 saveenv

Then, on each boot, you can choose to boot on SD3 with:

 run boot_on_sd3

or on uSD4:

 run boot_on_usd4

If you want to always boot on SD3 run:

 setenv bootcmd 'run boot_on_sd3'
 saveenv

or on uSD4:

 setenv bootcmd 'run boot_on_usd4'
 saveenv

If you want to go back to original behaviour, just do:

 setenv bootcmd 'bootcmd_mmc'
 saveenv

Known Issues

Some early revisions of SabreLite boards, have an issue with 1000 baseTx mode because the center tap pin 9 of the mag RJ45/USB combo was connected to the 3.3 filtered supply instead of letting it float. See: https://lists.denx.de/pipermail/u-boot/2012-February/117117.html To workaround the problem, you need to disable 1G mode in u-boot (setenv disable_giga 1 + save & reboot) and in Linux kernel (fec.disable_giga=1)