Gateworks Venice Family Support

Getting Started	Venice Software	Peripherals	User Manuals
Wireless / WiFi Radios	Cellular Modems	GPS	3D Model

The Gateworks Venice product family utilizes the NXP i.MX8M Mini (i.MX8MM) SoC (System On Chip) family offering a large variety of peripherals with a focus on Networking, Security, and Media. See ​​here for a product comparison matrix.

Links

Please note: This is a subset of information for Venice, however, please visit our Main Wiki for all other information

Software

• Software Section - Bootloader, Boot Firmware, Operating Systems, Kernel, etc

Peripheral Support

• Connector Pinouts - see ​Hardware User Manual
• Connector and Cable Information
• Serial Console Access
• USB Support - Note the standard Venice family supports USB 2.0 (USB 3.0 not currently offered)
• SPI Support
• I2C Support
• GPIO Control
• LED Control
• mSATA Information
• GPS Support
• CAN Bus Support
• PCIe Accessory Cards
• MultiMediaCard (microSD/eMMC) Information
• Gateworks System Controller (GSC) - Temperature, voltage, RTC, GPIO, Digital IO, I/O, pushbutton, etc
• Gateworks Expansion Modules - GW16081, GW16082, GW16083

Other Info

• ​Product Info
• ​Where to Buy
• Venice Board Ordering Options
• Venice Board Errata
• Linux Kernel Device-Tree info
• End of Life - EOL Dates

User Manuals

• ​All Gateworks User Manuals

Entire Raw Index of Venice Wiki Pages

• venice
• venice/DigitalIO
• venice/PCIe
• venice/SDP
• venice/boot
• venice/bootloader
• venice/bsp
• venice/encryption
• venice/errata
• venice/ethernet
• venice/firmware
• venice/gw7500
• venice/gw7905
• venice/memory
• venice/mipi
• venice/multimedia
• venice/npu
• venice/orderoptions
• venice/power
• venice/secure_boot
• venice/simsd
• venice/thermal
• venice/ubuntu
• venice/yocto

Venice Software

Venice Software is comprised of many pieces, including the following:

• GSC (Gateworks System Controller) Firmware
• Boot Firmware (ARM Trusted Firmware, DDR controller Firmware, U-Boot Bootloader)
• Operating System (including kernel / rootfs)

Ubuntu is pre-installed on all Venice boards before they ship.

Please view the following links for the appropriate software section:

• Choosing an OS
• Pre-built Software Images
• Building & Compiling BSP (Board Support Package) Images - This includes all the boot firmware & operating System
• Venice Software Installation page
• Venice Boot Firmware (up to and including the Bootloader)
• GSC Firmware
• Venice Mainline Linux kernel support
• Booting Third Party Linux Distro's on Venice
• Venice JTAG Programming
• Native Compile Hello World Example
• Buildroot Linux

Choosing a BSP

Gateworks offers several Board Support Packages for the Venice Product family. Which one we recommend depends a bit upon what your goal is and what your experience level is. Note: By default Venice boards are pre-programmed with and Ubuntu root filesystem and Gateworks kernel.

Ubuntu

Gateworks offers a pre-built Ubuntu root filesystem using the latest Gateworks kernel as well as instructions on how to build your own Ubuntu based distribution.

• Venice Ubuntu Wiki and Software

Venice pre-built Ubuntu root filesytem image:

• Recommended for developers trying to heavily leverage opensource software packages or libraries that are not supported by the other BSP's. This is the most user-friendly for developers new to Embedded Linux but will not produce a very trimmed down filesystem image.
• The Gateworks Ubuntu focual image can boot to login in about 26 seconds (removing the U-Boot bootdelay) and takes about 1.5GiB of FLASH storage. Several seconds of that time is spent waiting for the network interfaces to come up which can be disabled. Much of the required space is taken up by various packages we pre-install however it is difficult to get Ubuntu pruned down below 1GiB or booting much faster.
• Able to use mainline kernel.
• Supports all Venice features.
• Documentation provided to use Ubuntu pre-built packages and debootstrap to create a root filesystem in minutes
• Native compilation: no SDK or cross-toolchain needed

Buildroot

Gateworks provides documentation on building your own compact and customized Linux distribution using Buildroot:

• intended for custom applications (low flash and memory footprint)
• a standard buildroot image can boot to login in about 8 seconds (removing the U-Boot bootdelay) and can take less than 32MiB of FLASH storage (both of which can be reduced by turning off the console output and reducing the kernel features)
• Fairly up-to-date and/or vanilla kernel support
• Wide variety of packages
• Console-based build system
• exportable Toolchain available to build apps on a development host outside of the buildroot environment

Third Party Linux Distros

While Gateworks cannot fully support all Linux distros, it is relatively simple to overlay a Gateworks Venice kernel onto any non-Gateworks third party Linux distro rootfs image.

The following links will describe what is needed:

1. Linux kernel supporting Venice: linux/kernel
2. Root Filesystem: see below
3. Bootable media: linux/blockdev

Root filesystem Sources

There are several sources of pre-built root filesystems that are compatible with Venice. As Venice uses an ARM 64bit based SoC, you need to use something that is compatible with an ARMv8 instruction set. Many pre-built distributions will reference 'arm64' which means 'ARM 64-bit' which is appropriate for the i.MX8MM SoC.

Some popular third-party sources:

• ​Ubuntu Core - this is a minimal filesystem that you can build off of at runtime by adding packages from various repositories.
• ​Linaro - Linaro has several root filesystems including server, nano, developer, core, and ALIP. Each root filesystem will have different things installed for different purposes. Choose carefully which will work for you.

Notes:

• some root filesystems may require you to manually add a user before booting (ie Ubuntu Core)

Mainline Linux Kernel support

Gateworks actively participates in the development of the Linux kernel.

Mainline Linux Kernel support

Gateworks actively participates in the development of the Linux kernel.

The following table shows what i.MX8MM support is available in the mainline kernel:

item	DT compatible	driver	kconfig	kernel
mmc	fsl,imx7d-usdhc	drivers/mmc/host/sdhci-esdhc-imx.c	CONFIG_MMC_SDHCI_ESDHC_IMX
sdma	fsl,imx7d-sdma	drivers/dma/imx-sdma.c	CONFIG_IMX_SDMA
uart	fsl,imx6q-uart	imx-uart: drivers/tty/serial/imx.c	CONFIG_SERIAL_IMX
ethernet	fsl,imx6sx-fec	fec: drivers/net/ethernet/freescale/fec_main.c	CONFIG_FEC
i2c	fsl,imx21-i2c	drivers/i2c/busses/i2c-imx.c	CONFIG_I2C_IMX
spi	fsl,imx51-ecspi	drivers/spi/spi-imx.c	CONFIG_SPI_IMX
gpio	fsl,imx35-gpio	drivers/gpio/gpio-mxc.c	CONFIG_GPIO_MXC
wdog	fsl,imx21-wdt	drivers/watchdog/imx2_wdt.c	CONFIG_IMX2_WDT
pwm	fsl,imx27-pwm	drivers/pwm/pwm-imx27.c	CONFIG_PWM_IMX27
audio dai	fsl,imx8mq-sai	fsl-sai: sound/soc/fsl/fsl_sai.c	CONFIG_SND_SOC_FSL_SAI	5.4
caam	fsl,sec-v4.0	drivers/crypto/caam/*	CONFIG_CRYPTO_DEV_FSL_CAAM	5.6
ddrc (Dyanmic Scaling for DDR controller)	fsl,imx8m-ddrc	drivers/devfreq/imx8m-ddrc.c	ARM_IMX8M_DDRC_DEVFREQ	5.6
thermal	fsl,imx8mm-tmu	drivers/thermal/imx8mm_thermal.c	IMX8MM_THERMAL	5.7
fspi (Flex SPI)	nxp,imx8mm-fspi	drivers/spi/spi-nxp-fspi.c	SPI_NXP_FLEXSPI	5.7
usb1	not yet upstream as of v5.7 - should not be a driver change just need USB PM enabled
pci1	not yet upstream as of v5.7 - needs minor driver support PCIE PM
mipi dsi bridge	not yet upstream as of v5.7
mipi csi bridge	not yet upstream as of v5.7
vpu/hantro-g1	not yet upstream as of v5.7

1. While support may not be officially upstream yet, the Gateworks kernel does have support for these devices

See also:

• Prebuilt Venice Kernel: ​http://dev.gateworks.com/venice/kernel/
• Building the Venice Kernel as part of the BSP: venice/bsp
• Building a Mainline Kernel Wiki: linux/kernel