Getting Started

As an early access partner/customer you have received either an Apalis iMX8QM Ixora Starter Kit or an Apalis iMX8QM Evaluation Board Starter Kit. The modules are pre-installed on the respective carrier board including heatsink.


For V1.0A Modules:

The SoM is configured to boot from SD Card. The Starter Kit includes a bootable SD card which has an Yocto/OpenEmbedded built image pre-installed.

The image and corresponding SDK can be downloaded from the following location:

https://developer.toradex.com/files/toradex-dev/uploads/media/Colibri/Linux/BringUp/Apalis-iMX8/V1.0A/

To write the image file to an SD card unmount all partitions of the sdcard and use dd to write the image

sudo umount /dev/<sdcard>?
bunzip2 -c fsl-image-validation-imx-apalis-imx8.sdcard.bz2 | sudo dd of=/dev/<sdcard> bs=4M
sync

The Toradex BSP is based on the NXP L4.9.51 for i.MX 8QuadMax Beta2 BSP. You can find NXP’s BSP documentation here.

For a list of tested features and known issues refer to the README-TORADEX file in the BSP layer.


For V1.0B Modules:

The SoM is strapped to boot from eFuses which are factory fused to boot from eMMC.

The image and corresponding SDK can be downloaded from the following location:

https://developer.toradex.com/files/toradex-dev/uploads/media/Colibri/Linux/BringUp/Apalis-iMX8/V1.0B/

To write the image file to eMMC have a look at the following article on our developer website:

The Toradex BSP is based on the NXP L4.14.78_1.0.0_GA BSP. You can find NXP’s BSP documentation here.


For datasheets have a look here.

On developer.toradex.com are more articles for the Apalis iMX8 available:

The SDK installer generated from OpenEmbedded provides aarch64-poky-linux-gcc (GCC) 6.2.0, however, gcc-linaro-7.2.1 is the one used for kernel and u-boot compiling.

Make sure to flush the buffers after dd! Just use sync or umount rather than simply pulling off the card when dd is finished. You can check the progress of the flush with watch -n1 grep -e Dirty: -e Writeback: /proc/meminfo (Dirty being the total amount of memory, in kibibytes, waiting to be written back to the disk, and writeback, the total amount of memory, in kibibytes, actively being written back to the disk)

Yeah, you should really umount before and sync after (;-p).