Jan 30, 2015

Enabling i2c1 on BeagleBone Black without Device Tree overlays

Important: This way was pretty much made obsolete by Device Tree overlays, which have returned (as expected) in 3.19 kernels - it'd probably be easier to use these in most cases.

BeagleBone Black board has three i2c buses, two of which are available by default on Linux kernel with patches from RCN (Robert Nelson).

There are plenty of links on how to enable i2c1 on old-ish (by now) 3.8-series kernels, which had "Device Tree overlays" patches, but these do not apply to 3.9-3.18, though it looks like they might make a comeback in the future (LWN).
Probably it's just a bit too specific task to ask an easy answer for.

Overlays in pre-3.9 allowed to write a "patch" for a Device Tree, compile it and then load it at runtime, which is not possible without these, but perfectly possible and kinda-easy to do by compiling a dtb and loading it on boot.

It'd be great if there was a prebuilt dtb file in Linux with just i2c1 enabled (not just for some cape, bundled with other settings), but unfortunately, as of patched 3.18.4, there doesn't seem to be one, hence the following patching process.

For that, getting the kernel sources (whichever were used to build the kernel, ideally) is necessary.

In Arch Linux ARM (which I tend to use with such boards), this can be done by grabbing the PKGBUILD dir, editing the "PKGBUILD" file, uncommenting the "return 1" under "stop here - this is useful to configure the kernel" comment and running makepkg -sf (from "base-devel" package set on arch) there.
That will just unpack the kernel sources, put the appropriate .config file there and run make prepare on them.

With kernel sources unpacked, the file that you'd want to patch is "arch/arm/boot/dts/am335x-boneblack.dts" (or whichever other dtb you're loading via uboot):

--- am335x-boneblack.dts.bak    2015-01-29 18:20:29.547909768 +0500
+++ am335x-boneblack.dts        2015-01-30 20:56:43.129213998 +0500
@@ -23,6 +23,14 @@
 };

 &ocp {
+       /* i2c */
+       P9_17_pinmux {
+               status = "disabled";
+       };
+       P9_18_pinmux {
+               status = "disabled";
+       };
+
        /* clkout2 */
        P9_41_pinmux {
                status = "disabled";
@@ -33,6 +41,13 @@
        };
 };

+&i2c1 {
+       status = "okay";
+       pinctrl-names = "default";
+       pinctrl-0 = <&i2c1_pins>;
+       clock-frequency = <100000>;
+};
+
 &mmc1 {
        vmmc-supply = <&vmmcsd_fixed>;
 };

Then "make dtbs" can be used to build dtb files only, and not the whole kernel (which would take a while on BBB).

Resulting *.dtb (e.g. "am335x-boneblack.dtb" for "am335x-boneblack.dts", in the same dir) can be put into "dtbs" on boot partition and loaded from uEnv.txt (or whatever uboot configs are included from there).

Reboot, and i2cdetect -l should show i2c-1:

# i2cdetect -l
i2c-0   i2c             OMAP I2C adapter                    I2C adapter
i2c-1   i2c             OMAP I2C adapter                    I2C adapter
i2c-2   i2c             OMAP I2C adapter                    I2C adapter

As I've already mentioned before, this might not be the optimal way to enable the thing in kernels 3.19 and beyond, if "device tree overlays" patches will land there - it should be possible to just load some patch on-the-fly there, without all the extra hassle described above.

Update 2015-03-19: Device Tree overlays landed in 3.19 indeed, but if migrating to use these is too much hassle for now, here's a patch for 3.19.1-bone4 am335x-bone-common.dtsi to enable i2c1 and i2c2 on boot (applies in the same way, make dtbs, copy am335x-boneblack.dtb to /boot/dtbs).

posted on 2015-01-30 20:20 YEKT
hardware linux arm