Orin NX Lockstep

Cortex-A78AE seems to support hardware lockstepping.

I see num_clusters_1core_pair_lockstep and num_clusters_2core_pair_lockstep on the cpu node in the device tree, but I wasn’t able to find any documentation on how to set those values

Would it be possible to configure the Orin NX 16GB to have 2 cores in lockstep, the other 6 just as normal cores?

It would be helpful if there was an example/documentation on how to set this up as well

Thanks!

Hi,
Please check if you can get more information from the website:
Documentation – Arm Developer

We don’t actually have experience about using the mode. One similar function is to set isolcpus in extlinux.conf to isolate the cores. And then you can schedule processes to the cores by calling taskset. You may check and see if this can be applied to your use-case.

I normally associate lockstep only with the Cortex-R series. There are some Cortex-R cores in the SoC, but mostly you don’t have access to those. I can’t say for certain, but it is unlikely the Cortex-A cores support lockstep. Note that device tree entries which are not understood by hardware would typically just be ignored, and so it is possible that part of the tree has no function (or function related to hardware you can’t access).

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 14 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.