Manually re-flashing the u-boot

From Openmoko

Jump to: navigation, search

This page explains how you can manually re-flash the U-Boot into your Neo1973. It is basically the manual task of what the Devirginator tries to do automatically (but not always works).

Contents

Prerequirements

  • Neo1973 device (any device will work)
  • Debug Board or other device supported by openocd
  • lowlevel_foo.bin for your board (e.g. from buildhost)
  • u-boot.bin for your board (e.g. from buildhost)
  • OpenOCD
  • a host PC system (running Linux is strongly recommended, while other OS's might work, too)

Steps that you do

Connections

  1. Connect the debug board upstream USB port to your PC
  2. Connect the FPC to your debug board
  3. Connect the FPC to your Neo1973
  4. Put a charged battery into your Neo1973
  5. Push the power button of your Neo1973 to swithc it on

Starting software

  1. Start OpenOCD (see detailed instructions on OpenOCD page)
  2. telnet to port 4444

Copy u-boot into RAM and start it

So how can we boot from RAM? We use JTAG / OpenOCD to

  • Reset and halt the cpu at PC=0
> reset halt
target halted in ARM state due to debug request, current mode: Supervisor
cpsr: 0x400000d3 pc: 0x00000000
MMU: disabled, D-Cache: disabled, I-Cache: disabled
  • Download a small piece of code for low-level SDRAM timing initialization (overwrite 4k SRAM of steppingstone)
> load_binary /space/misc/gta01/u-boot.git/board/neo1973/gta01/lowlevel_foo.bin 0            
downloaded 332 byte in 0s 21899us
  • Assert a break point at address 0x33f80000 (which indicates that the low-level code has finished)
> bp 0x33f80000 4 hw
breakpoint added at address 0x33f80000
  • Run the code up to the break point
> resume
Target 0 resumed
> Target 0 halted
target halted in ARM state due to breakpoint, current mode: Supervisor
cpsr: 0x600000d3 pc: 0x33f80000
MMU: disabled, D-Cache: disabled, I-Cache: enabled
  • Download the U-Boot RAM image to 0x33f80000
> load_binary /space/misc/gta01/u-boot.git/u-boot.bin 0x33f80000
downloaded 135692 byte in 6s 567264us
  • Resume processing
> resume
Target 0 resumed

At this point, the display backlight gets bright and we see the following familiar prompt on the serial console:

U-Boot 1.1.6 (Jan 13 2007 - 23:44:23)

DRAM:  128 MB
NAND:  64 MiB
*** Warning - bad CRC or NAND, using default environment

In:    serial
Out:   serial
Err:   serial
Hit any key to stop autoboot:  0 
GTA01Bv2 # 

copying u-boot into RAM

Now you have the full U-Boot running from RAM, you can use all its drivers and have various options to transfer data into the Neo, such as a new U-Boot image for NAND. You can use

  • DFU / dfu-utils directly into the partitions such as U-Boot, kernel, rootfs
  • alternative
      • halt the system from JTAG, and copy data into RAM
      • copy data from microSD using mmcinit/ext2load
    • then resume into U-Boot and use 'nand write.e'

FIXME: I'll finish after lunch

Personal tools