HoneyComb LX2 / ClearFog CX LX2 Quick Start Guide

Introduction

The following quick start guide provides background information about the HoneyComb LX2 and ClearFog CX LX2 products which use the LX2160A Computer on module.

The guide will give a technical overview about the product and by the end of it you should be able to boot an operating system and begin testing your application.

Revision and Notes

Date

Owner

Revision

Notes

28 Oct 2021

1.0

Hardware Setup

Product Specifications

ClearFog CX LX2

HoneyComb LX2

I/Os

3 x USB 3.0 3 x USB 2.0

Networking

1 x QSFP port 100GbE 4 x SFP+ ports (10GbE each) 1 x 1GbE copper (RJ45)

4 x SFP+ ports (10GbE each) 1 x 1GbE copper (RJ45)

Processor

NXP Layerscape LX2160A 16-core Arm Cortex A72 up to 2GHz

Memory & Storage

Up to 64GB DDR4 DIMM 64GB eMMC MicroSD 4 x SATA 3.0

Misc.

USB to STM32 for remote management

Development and Debug interfaces

Micro USB JTAG

Power

ATX standard

Expansion card I/Os

1 x PCIe x8 Gen 3.0, open slot (can support x16) 1 x M.2

Temperature

Commercial: 0°C to 70°C

Dimensions

PCBA: 170 x 170mm

See list of tested LX2160A COM Tested SO-DIMM Memory modules.
The difference between the two versions is that HoneyComb does not have a QSFP interface
Serdes-1 lanes 0..3 are routed to the QSFP28 connector via TI retimers
Serdes-1 lanes 4..7 are directly connected to the 4xSFP+ ports

Block Diagram

The following figure describes the ClearFog CX Block Diagram.

Visual features overview

Please see below the features overview of the connector side of the HoneyComb

Software Setup

Cable setup and prerequisites

Here is what you will need to power up the board:

Linux or Windows PC
ClearFog CX/ HoneyComb
ATX 150W+ or Pico PSU 5A@12V
Micro USB to USB for console, the ClearFog Base has an onboard FTDI chip.
IP router or IP switch

Recommended Cables

The following is a list of industry-standard cables, sorted by type, with the necessary compliance requirements that have been proven to work well with the ClearFog product family.

These examples are the cables which SolidRun uses for testing, and should provide enough information to source products from your preferred cable vendor.

Ethernet cable: Monoprice 24AWG Cat6A 500MHz STP
USB Cable: SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Type A Male to Female Extension Cable in Black
SFP connector: GigaLite GE-GB-P1RT-E SFP module with Monoprice 24AWG Cat6A 500MHz STP cable

Boot Select

Before powering up the board for the first time it is recommended to select the boot media. In order to configure the boot media, please refer to the following DIP switch:

Boot media

Switch 1

Switch 2

Switch 3

Switch 4

Switch 5

OFF

eMMC

OFF

SPI

OFF

The following shows how to set the switches on the boot source selector:

Booting from an SD card

The switches on the boot source SW1 selector must be set as follows:

Switch 1

Switch 2

Switch 3

Switch 4

Switch 5

OFF

The following shows how to set the switches on the boot source selector:

Once you set the switches, you can apply the following for booting from an SD card.

1. Downloading the image

Download a pre-built snapshot image from SolidRun Images

Those images are organised by branch, build-date and commit id from the GitHub - SolidRun/lx2160a_build project that you can clone and build by yourself.

Please note The prebuilt images are configured for SO-DIMM DDR4 with speed of 2900, 2600 and 2400 Mtps (with or without ECC support),. Images that have the infix _xspi_ are intended to be flashed into SPI and recommended for later use after booting another image from micro SD

You can build your own image using the script in here – GitHub - SolidRun/lx2160a_build

2. Writing the image to the SD card

Use the following commands for writing the image to an SD card:

xz -dc lx2160a_....img.xz | dd of=/dev/sdX bs=4M conv=fsync

For more information, please visit Flashing an SD Card .

Note: Plug a micro SD into your Linux PC, the following assumes that the micro SD is added as /dev/sdX and all it’s partitions are unmounted.

3. SD card insertion

Please Insert the SD card into your device.

4. Power connection

Connect your power ATX, and then connect the adaptor to mains supply.

5. Serial Connection

Please insert the micro USB into your device, then you can refer to Serial Connection for installing necessary serial connection software in Linux/Windows.

6. Install rootfs Image to eMMC (or microSD)

The default images are designed to simplify installation of rootfs to eMMC, booting only into a minimal initramfs. For access to a full featured rootfs, install the contained image to either eMMC or the very same microSD:

Stop the u-boot count down by clicking any key –

To flash to eMMC run the following commands (it will wipe your data on the eMMC device).

load mmc 0:1 0xa4000000 ubuntu-core.img
mmc dev 1
mmc write 0xa4000000 0 0xd2000

Alternatively flash to the same microSD card used to boot:

load mmc 0:1 0xa4000000 ubuntu-core.img
mmc dev 0
mmc write 0xa4000000 0 0xd2000

Please Note: The above commands should be run only once (in the fist boot), or when a new image is to be used.

Boot the machine by running ‘boot’ in u-boot.

Once you installed the necessary serial connection software and ran the above commands , you should be able to see the following:

In order to be able to log in , please insert “root” as a username and password as follows:

Please note If you are willing to use a similar image in production you must change this password, or completely disable root login.

7. Final stages

The following stages need to be done in order to finalise the imaging:

Run fdisk /dev/mmcblk1 if using SD, or run if using fdisk /dev/mmcblk0 eMMC.
Recreate the first partition by deleting it and then creating a new partition that starts at block 131072 and extends to the end of the drive (or less depending on your needs).
Write the new partition, when prompt about ‘Do you want to remove the signature?’ then answer with No.
Run resize2fs /dev/mmcblk1p1 if using SD Card, or Run resize2fs /dev/mmcblk0p1 if using eMMC.
In this stage the root partition should be big enough to start populating it; but first update the RTC clock.
Connect the RJ45 to your network with internet access (and DHCP server); and then run dhclient .
Update the RTC clock by running ntpdate pool.ntp.org and then hwclock -w.
Run apt-update commands below and then populate the root filesystem as you wish.

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -y

Please see below an example of resizing the filesystem :

SFP Modules

For some SFP modules that were tested on SolidRun LX216x Platforms see SFP Modules: Tested on LX216x.

Using the built-in NICs

In case of SERDES configuration of 18 (default build) then dpmac.3 to dpmac.10 can be exposed. Those are 8x10 interfaces where first 4 dpmac.3 to dpmac.6 are exposed on QSFP connector, the remaining dpmac.7 to dpmac.10 are on the 2x2 SFP+ connector cage.

The 4 ports on QSFP can be accessed via 40G to 4x10G or 100G to 4x25G splitter cables (so called octopus cable), for 25Gbps speed Linux device-tree needs to be changed.

The SFP+ ports are designed for 10G. They can still support 25G with active modules (i.e. fiber or RJ45) however with some risk of noise between connector and CPU.

Ports are activated using NXP’s “restool” package. For example – dpmac.9 is the SFP+ port on the upper row and left towards PCB edge –

ls-addni dpmac.9

and then a new ethX ethernet interface is attached to the kernel.

For SERDES SD1 config 20 which is dual 40G, then dpmac.1 and dpmac.2 are to be used where dpmac.1 is achieved directly by using the QSFP port and dpmac.2 by using an 40G to 4x10G splitter cable where the splitter cable is connected to HoneyComb.

For different dpmac configuration please refer to the reference manual on different SERDES configuration and how it’s map to the different dpmacs.

DPDK

For DPDK support please see our LX2160A DPDK Documentation.

IEEE 1588

The LX2160A CEX-7 module can expose some IEEE1588 related pins of LX2160A SoC to the carrier board using non-standard reserved pins of CEX-7 connector. It must be enabled manually, see LX2160A CEX-7 HW User Manual for rework instructions.

IEEE 1588

The Clearfog-CX & Honeycomb boards have a dedicated pin header providing optional access to the IEEE1588 features of LX2160A, located between PCI-E and M.2 connectors and labeled J29:

LX2160A Signal

Pin on J29

Voltage

Notes

I1588_PULSE_OUT2

1.8V

Assemble R542

I1588_TRIG_IN1

1.8V

I1588_PULSE_OUT1

1.8V

Assemble R540

I1588_TRIG_IN2

1.8V

I1588_ALARM_OUT1

1.8V

EVT3_B

3.3V

GPIO (output only)

I1588_ALARM_OUT2

1.8V

I1588_CLK_OUT

1.8V

IEEE_RCLK0

1.8V

I1588_CLK_IN

1.8V

IEEE 1588 / Sync-E SMU

The Clearfog-CX & Honeycomb boards have assembly option for a Synchronization Management Unit (SMU), which was never tested.

GPUs

GPUs that were briefly tested –

AMD RX550 2GB – requires installing the kernel modules first and then ‘linux-firmware’ package. Running ‘glmark2’ under X results 4633 and ‘glmark2 –fullscreen’ results 3983.
GeForce GTX 1050 2GT OCV1 – requires instsalling the kernel modules (simply untar on the root filesystem root directory) then the GPU is recognized and initialized. windowed glmark2 result is 150; which is very poor and most probably related to the OSS drivers (no binary drivers for ARM as for the time writing this article).

Tips

sshd is disabled by default for root access. Edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config and set ‘PermitRootLogin yes’
ssh to the machine might take long time after boot. To accelerate that install ‘rng-tools’ where it’s main daemon increases the kernel’s entropy and accelerates random number key generation (which used by libssl and sshd afterwards).

Example to install Gentoo from the Ubuntu

Gentoo is a free and open-source distribution with a rolling-release model. The bootloader and kernel provided are recent enough to install Gentoo from the eMMC Ubuntu to the NVMe or SATA device.

 apt install btrfs-progs
 mkfs.btrfs /dev/nvme0n1p1
 mount /dev/nvme0n1p1 /mnt
 cd /mnt
# change 20200609 with what's available here http://distfiles.gentoo.org/experimental/arm64/
 wget http://distfiles.gentoo.org/experimental/arm64/stage3-arm64-20200609.tar.bz2
 mount --rbind /dev dev
 mount --make-rslave dev
 mount -t proc /proc proc
 mount --rbind /sys sys
 mount --make-rslave sys
 mount --rbind /tmp tmp
 cp /etc/resolv.conf etc
 chroot . /bin/bash
 env-update && . /etc/profile
 emerge-webrsync
 emerge superadduser openssh vim
# Set the root password
 passwd 
# enable root login
 vim /etc/ssh/sshd_config 
# or create your user
 superadduser your_user
 ln -s /etc/init.d/net.{lo,eth0}
 rc-update add sshd default
 reboot

Please note

If you need to install the Gentoo to the SATA change the /dev/nvme0n1p1 to /dev/sdx.
In the same way, can install Debian or another Linux arm64 distribution.

Please note

The default bootcmd probes every device and looks for a /extlinux/extlinux.conf
The kernel command line uses the PARTUUID to boot the right drive can editing the root in the extlinux.conf to use directly root=/dev/nvme0n1p1 or root=/dev/sdx .

Build From Source

You can build your own image using the script in here – GitHub - SolidRun/lx2160a_build
Generating UEFI firmware for the LX2160a - GitHub - SolidRun/lx2160a_uefi
Using HoneyComb LX2K as a Desktop - https://github.com/Wooty-B/LX2K_Guide

Download a pre-built snapshot image based on Ubuntu 20.04 from here SolidRun Images
Download a UEFI firmware for the LX2160a from here SolidRun Images

Documentation

5MB

ClearFog-CX-and-HoneyComb-Schematics-and-Layout-4977.zip