The Undocumented Pi

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The Undocumented Pi

Hardware

SoC

There is a nicely ordered table with all BCM2835_registers as found in the GPU code published by Broadcom. Unfortunately, the table does not quite match the SoC in the Raspberry Pi, but it's a good start. The sections below should serve as a companion to that table.

Clocks

All SoC clocks are derived from a crystal oscillator (54.0 MHz for RPi4, 19.2 MHz for all other models). RPi4 has one more oscillator (25.0 MHz), which is used by the VIA VL805 USB 3.0 host controller. A diagram of the clock hierarchy:

Each PLL is a fractional N frequency synthesizer that can generate N/M times the crystal oscillator frequency (XOSC). The integer part of N is controlled by the NDIV field of the A2W_PLLx_CTRL register; the fractional part is stored in A2W_PLLx_FRAC. The M refers to the PDIV field of A2W_PLLx_CTRL. There is also a prescaler in the feedback path, which is controlled by a bit in the A2W_PLLx_ANA1 register:

• bit 11 for PLLH
• bit 14 for all other PLLs

The loop filter is controlled by three parameters: K_A, K_I and K_P (cf. A2W_PLLx_ANA_KAIP). It is most likely some sort of a PID controller, but it is not clear why the first coefficient is called K_A and not K_D. It may have some significance, though.

A PLL can have up to 4 output channels, each with an independent divider. These PLL channels can be used as clock sources by the individual muxes. There are different kinds of muxes:

• Oscillator muxes cannot use any PLL channels.
• Core muxes can use PLL CORE channels.
• Peripheral muxes can use PLL PER channels.
• DSIx muxes can use PLL DSIx channels. DSI0 clock source can be taken either from PLLA, or from PLLD, depending on the SELPLLD bit in the DSI0HSCK register.

BCM283x

There is a VCE block to accelerate video encoding/decoding. No documentation AFAIK.

BCM2711

This chip may not have PLLH, or it works differently.

There is no prescaler in the feedback loop. The corresponding bit in ANA1 can still be set, but it does not have any effect on the PLL frequency.

It also lacks the following clock muxes:

• GNRIC
• CCP2
• HSM (controlled through other registers?)
• SLIM
• SDC (secondary SDRAM clock)
• ARM (controlled through other registers?)
• AVEO

It has the following extra clock mux registers (their names are just made up, because there is no official documentation):

name	address	type	width	mask	reset	description
CM_HEVCCTL	0x7e1011c8	RW	20	???	0000000000
CM_HEVCDIV	0x7e1011cc	RW	24	0x00ffffff	0000000000
CM_EMMC2CTL	0x7e1011d0	RW	20	???	0000000000
CM_EMMC2DIV	0x7e1011d4	RW	24	0x00ffffff	0000000000
CM_GENET250CTL	0x7e1011e8	RW	20	???	0000000000
CM_GENET250DIV	0x7e1011ec	RW	24	0x00ffffff	0000000000
CM_STB27CTL	0x7e1011f0	RW	20	???	0000000000
CM_STB27DIV	0x7e1011f4	RW	24	0x00ffffff	0000000000
CM_STB108CTL	0x7e101200	RW	20	???	0000000000
CM_STB108DIV	0x7e101204	RW	24	0x00ffffff	0000000000
CM_PIXBVBCTL	0x7e101208	RW	20	???	0000000000
CM_PIXBVBDIV	0x7e10120c	RW	24	0x00ffffff	0000000000
CM_GENET125CTL	0x7e101210	RW	20	???	0000000000
CM_GENET125DIV	0x7e101214	RW	24	0x00ffffff	0000000000
CM_M2MCCTL	0x7e10122c	RW	20	???	0000000000
CM_M2MCDIV	0x7e101230	RW	24	0x00ffffff	0000000000
CM_USBXHCICTL	0x7e10123c	RW	20	???	0000000000
CM_USBXHCIDIV	0x7e101240	RW	24	0x00ffffff	0000000000

There is a hardware register which contains the chip version and revision (name made up again):

name	address	type	width	mask	reset	description
ID_CHIPREV	0x7c404000	RW	24	0xffffffff	2711xxxxxx	Bits 16..31 always contain the value 0x2711. Bits 0..7 contain the stepping, apparently encoded as two nibbles: ((letter - 'A') << 4) | digit, for example B0 gets encoded as 0x10.

The VCE block was apparently removed, but there is now a HEVC block.

PMIC

The BCM2835 chip has an on-chip SMPS and an LDO for the LPDDR2 memory chip. RPi2 and RPi3 B use custom circuitry to do the power-up sequencing; it is made of discrete components, including an NCP6343 chip (datasheet) at I²C address 0x1c. The RPi 3B+ and RPi 4B boards contain a MaxLinear MxL7704 (datasheet) at address 0x1d.

The PMIC is always on the system I²C bus (I2C8 on RPi4, I2C0 on all other devices).

See also this very informative blog post by James Adams.

Firmware

The firmware reads options from config.txt. Most options are officially documented, but there are additional undocumented options. Note that this is a growing list.

force_mac_address

Use this option to set a non-default MAC address for the on-board Ethernet. For example:

force_mac_address=12:34:56:78:9a:bc

Abbreviations

CCP2

Compact Camera Port 2

CM

Clock Manager

HSM

HDMI State Machine

ISP

Image Sensor Pipeline

OTP

One-Time Programmable (memory)