This feature is intended for advanced users.
As of 15 July 2014, the Raspberry Pi firmware supports custom default pin configurations through a user-provided Device Tree blob file. In order to ensure that your firmware is recent enough, please run vcgencmd version
.
In order to compile a Device Tree source (.dts
) file into a Device Tree blob (.dtb
) file, the Device Tree compiler must be installed by running sudo apt-get install device-tree-compiler
. The dtc
command can then be used as follows:
sudo dtc -I dts -O dtb -o /boot/dt-blob.bin dt-blob.dts
NOTE: In the case of NOOBS installs, the DTB file should be placed on the recovery partition instead.
Similarly, a .dtb
file can be converted back to a .dts
file, if required.
dtc -I dtb -O dts -o dt-blob.dts /boot/dt-blob.bin
The dt-blob.bin
is used to configure the binary blob (VideoCore) at boot time. It is not something that the Linux kernel
uses at the moment, although a kernel section will be added at a later stage when we move the Raspberry Pi kernel to use
a dt-blob for configuration. The dt-blob is capable of configuring each of the different versions of the Raspberry Pi,
including the Compute Module, to set up the alternative settings correctly. The following sections are valid in the dt-blob:
-
videocore
This section contains the whole VideoCore blob information; all subsequent sections must be enclosed within this section.
-
pins_*
There are up to eight separate pins_* sections, namely:
- pins_rev1 Rev1 pin setup. There are some differences because of the moved I2C pins.
- pins_rev2 Rev2 pin setup. This includes the additional codec pins on P5.
- pins_bplus1 Model B+ rev 1.1, including the full 40pin connector.
- pins_bplus2 Model B+ rev 1.2, swapping the low-power and lan-run pins.
- pins_aplus Model A+, lacking Ethernet.
- pins_2b1 Pi 2 Model B rev 1.0; controls the SMPS via I2C0.
- pins_2b2 Pi 2 Model B rev 1.1; controls the SMPS via software I2C on 42 and 43.
- pins_cm The Compute Module; note the default for this is the default for the chip, so it can be a useful source of information about default pull ups/downs on the chip.
Each
pins_*
section can containpin_config
andpin_defines
sections. -
pin_config
The
pin_config
section is used to configure the individual pins. Each item in this section must be a named pin section, such aspin@p32
, meaning GPIO32. There is a special sectionpin@default
, which has the default settings for anything not specifically named in the pin_config section. -
pin@pinname
This section can contain any combination of the following items:
polarity
active_high
active_low
termination
pull_up
pull_down
no_pulling
startup_state
active
inactive
function
input
output
sdcard
i2c0
i2c1
spi
spi1
spi2
smi
dpi
pcm
pwm
uart0
uart1
gp_clk
emmc
arm_jtag
drive_strength_ma
The drive strength is used to set a strength for the pins; please note you can only set the bank to a single drive strength. <8> and <16> are valid values.
-
pin_defines
This section is used to set specific VideoCore functionality to particular pins. This enables the user to move the camera power enable pin to somewhere different, or move the HDMI hotplug position; in other words, things that Linux has no control over. Please refer to the example DTS file below.
It is possible to change the configuration of the clocks through this interface, although very difficult to predict the results! The configuration of the clocking system is very complex; there are five separate PLLs, and each one has its own fixed (or variable, in the case of PLLC) VCO frequency. Each VCO then has a number of different channels which can be set up with a different division of the VCO frequency. Then each of the clock destinations can be configured to come from one of the clock channels, although there is a restricted mapping of source to destination, so not all channels can be routed to all clock destinations.
Here a couple of example configurations that you can use to alter very specific clocks. Beyond this, it is something we'll add to when requests for clock configurations are made.
clock_routing {
vco@PLLA { freq = <1966080000>; };
chan@APER { div = <4>; };
clock@GPCLK0 { pll = "PLLA"; chan = "APER"; };
};
clock_setup {
clock@PWM { freq = <2400000>; };
clock@GPCLK0 { freq = <12288000>; };
clock@GPCLK1 { freq = <25000000>; };
};
The above will set the PLLA to a source VCO running at 1.96608GHz (the limits for this VCO are 600MHz - 2.4GHz), change the APER channel to /4, and configure GPCLK0 to be sourced from PLLA through APER. This is used specifically to give an audio codec the 12288000Hz it needs to do the 48000 range of frequencies.
NOTE: As this is a new feature, there is no reference DTS file which is guaranteed to be supported by future firmware revisions.
The DTS file used for the DTB compiled into the 30 May 2015 firmware can be downloaded from here.