Running and profiling Arm NN on the Hikey 960

Flash the base firmware and OS

The flash process builds on an existing project used to flash the base firmware and operating system. The flash process also ensures that the partition table is reset to the default state before installing the operating system. The flow is to clone the project from github, copy in some new files, and run the flash procedure. Download the project using:

$ git clone https://github.com/96boards-hikey/tools-images-hikey960

Fastboot, the Android flashing and booting utility, is used to flash the images. It can be obtained either from the Android SDK platform tools or installed using the following code:

$ sudo apt-get install fastboot

Flashing the base firmware may or may not be required. Whether or not it is required depends on the state of your board, but we recommend doing it for best results. To flash the base firmware, follow the procedure from 96boards.org, which is outlined in the following table.

Perform the flashing process in to two parts, recovery mode and fastboot mode, as described below. First, you will need to become familiar with the switches that control the modes on the board.

The board has three distinct modes: normal, fastboot, and recovery, as you can see in the following table. Recovery mode is used first, then fastboot, and finally normal mode to boot and run.