Programming eMMC on i.MX8

This post intends to answer the question of programming the eMMC memory you can find on our Nitrogen8m and Nitrogen8m mini 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.

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
Go into Fastboot Mode
- This can be done by simply using the following command in u-boot on the board:

=> fastboot 0

Please download android platform tools from the following link and install it.
- https://developer.android.com/studio/releases/platform-tools.html#download

If you are flashing Android, please use the provided script (flash_fastboot.sh) to fastboot the image to eMMC.
- First download the image from the here for nitrogen8m or here for nitrogen8m mini. Then unzip it and start fastbooting with the following command:

boundary@boundary:~/$ sudo ./flash_fastboot.sh

If you are flashing Ubuntu, please use the following command on your host machine to fastboot the image to eMMC.
- You can download the fastboot image from the here for nitrogen8m or here for nitrogen8m mini. Then please unzip it and start fastbooting with the following command:

boundary@boundary:~/$ sudo fastboot flash gpt gpt_8G.img
boundary@boundary:~/$ sudo fastboot flash rootfs rootfs_8G.simg

This feature is fully explained here:

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 mmc 0

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 [your image name].img.gz | sudo dd of=/dev/sdX bs=1M