Re: armhf Installer Image
On Fri, Nov 14, 2014 at 10:03:51PM +0100, Rainer Dorsch wrote:
> On Tuesday 11 November 2014 08:10:14 Karsten Merker wrote:
> > On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 11:52:54PM +0100, Rainer Dorsch wrote:
> > > I am wondering if there is a debian installer image for armhf for cubox-
> > > i/armhf.
> > >
> > > If yes, any documentation on how the installer process works (e.g. boots
> > > from USB, installs on micro sd card, etc. or boots from micro SD and also
> > > installs on micro SD etc.) would be helpful for me.
> > Booting a netboot installer image by TFTP is described at
> > http://d-i.debian.org/manual/en.armhf/ch05s01.html.
>
> Does this imply that I need to install a micro SD card with the u-boot SPL?
As stated before, I do not have any experience with the Cubox
systems, but from what I can gather from existing documentation,
this is correct, as they do not seem to have any internal flash
storage with u-boot.
Please note that the SPL on itself is not sufficient; you also
have to write the actual main u-boot image to the SD card. U-boot
consists of two parts:
a) the u-boot SPL that does some low-level system initialization,
which is often dependent on the particular SoC model
b) the "main" u-boot part, which contains the user-side
functionality and can be the same for a whole SoC family
If the SD card is accessible as /dev/sdX, with the u-boot-images
from the u-boot-imx package in sid, you should be able to get
a bootable SD card with
dd if=/usr/lib/u-boot/mx6_cubox-i/u-boot-spl.bin of=/dev/sdX bs=1K seek=1
dd if=/usr/lib/u-boot/mx6_cubox-i/u-boot.img of=/dev/sdX bs=1K seek=42
Once you have have booted from this SD card, you should get a
u-boot prompt, from which you can continue as described in the
installation guide.
> > Daily-built netboot images are available at
> > http://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/armhf/daily/netboot/ and
> > the device-tree files for the supported systems are at
> > http://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/armhf/daily/device-tree/.
> >
> > We have recently added support for hd-media images, i.e. booting
> > the installer from a USB stick, to d-i, but this works "out of
> > the box" only on systems that have a very recent u-boot version
> > (v2014.10) with support for the new common u-boot bootcmd
> > handling framework.
>
> Again, here we are talking about the SPL not the IPL, right? In this case you
> the u-boot version from sid would do for the Cubox-i you mention.
I am not sure that we are using the same nomenclature regarding
IPL (Initial Program Loader) and SPL (Secondary Program Loader).
On modern ARM-based SoCs, IPL usually means the hardcoded boot
ROM code that is a fixed part of the SoC; it performs the primary
startup of the SoC and loads the SPL boot code from a removable
medium into some SoC-internal SRAM. After the IPL is run, i.e.
at the point where control gets transferred to the SPL, the
system DRAM controller is usually not yet set up, so only this
small area of SRAM is accessible. This area is too small for a
full-featured firmware/bootloader, so the SPL sets up the DRAM
controller and loads the remaining firmware/bootloader code
(often called the TPL - Tertiary Program Loader) into DRAM and
starts it there.
In our case we have:
- IPL: internal to the i.MX6 SoC
- SPL: /usr/lib/u-boot/mx6_cubox-i/u-boot-spl.bin
- TPL: /usr/lib/u-boot/mx6_cubox-i/u-boot.img
Regarding the hd-media support: as Vagrant wrote that he has
patched some support for the new common u-boot bootcmd handling
into the i.MX6 u-boot.img in sid, this should hopefully work, but
due to lack of i.MX6 hardware I have never tested that.
Please note that as a new kernel version has migrated to testing
sometime this week, there might be a mismatch between the
daily-built hd-media tarball and the testing CD image which was
generated last monday. A new CD image will be built next monday,
which should solve this issue, but for the moment you should
probably first try installing by tftp.
Regards,
Karsten
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