NXP i.MX95 Dev Kit

The NXP i.MX95 Dev Kit is the primary and source-of-truth thesis platform. All performance claims, isolation measurements, and chapter evidence are captured here. QEMU is used for CI gating; i.MX95 is used for thesis-grade evidence.

SoC Overview

Partition Topology

cpus:
  linux_a55:  [0, 1, 2, 3]   # A55 cluster (EL1 Linux)
  rtos_m7:    [100]            # M7 MCU domain (bare-metal FreeRTOS)
  hypervisor: [4, 5]           # A55 cores reserved for EL2 overhead

Hardware Setup

1. Board power and UART

Connect UART debug cable (USB-C on the board’s debug port) to host. Set baud rate: 115200 8N1. Expected first output: TF-A boot log.

2. Boot media

Haven targets SD card boot in early development. eMMC boot is the Release 3 target. Prepare SD card with TF-A + U-Boot + Haven EL2 image.

3. JTAG (optional)

Connect SEGGER J-Link or Lauterbach TRACE32 for bare-metal debugging during early bring-up.

4. Network

1 GbE is available for TFTP boot during development. Assign a static IP on the dev subnet and configure U-Boot bootcmd to TFTP the Haven image.

Full hardware setup procedure: docs/porting/IMX95_HARDWARE_SETUP.md

Validation Runbook

1. Flash TF-A BL2 + BL31 to SD card partition 1.
2. Flash U-Boot to SD card partition 2.
3. Build Haven core and package with Linux and FreeRTOS images.
4. TFTP or flash the combined image.
5. Boot and observe: TF-A log (NOTICE: BL31: v2.x...), Haven log ([haven] stage2 init), Linux boot log on UART0, FreeRTOS tick log on UART2 (M7 console).
6. Run isolation smoke tests via serial terminal.
7. Capture UART logs and store in build/evidence/imx95/logs/.

Full runbook: docs/porting/IMX95_VALIDATION_RUNBOOK.md

Evidence Capture

Each thesis campaign produces a structured evidence package:

build/evidence/imx95/
├── logs/         UART captures (TF-A, Haven, Linux, RTOS)
├── metrics/      Latency distributions, budget overrun counts
└── captures/     Photos/video of UART output on physical board

Template: docs/methodology/IMX95_EVIDENCE_TEMPLATE.md

Roadmap Status