Re: Providing (armhf) u-boot images together with d-i images?
On Sat, Dec 6, 2014 at 1:07 PM, Robert Nelson <robertcnelson@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 6, 2014 at 12:46 PM, Karsten Merker <merker@debian.org> wrote:
>> On Wed, Dec 03, 2014 at 03:10:37PM -0800, Vagrant Cascadian wrote:
>>
>> [providing u-boot images for armhf platforms that do not have
>> u-boot in non-volatile storage]
>>
>>> Simply extracting the relevent u-boot files doesn't seem like enough to
>>> me. They still need to be installed at particular offsets to the raw SD
>>> card, or in some cases, to a fat partition on the SD card, though may be
>>> fussy about exactly where on the fat partition it resides in a rather
>>> hair-pulling way... so providing just the binaries makes it a little
>>> easier, but not a whole lot.
>>
>> I guess it would make sense to provide both the "naked" u-boot
>> binaries for people who want to manually write them to an SD card
>> that already contains a partition table without destroying it,
>> and an additional tiny disk image (<1MB) that contains u-boot at
>> the proper place (but nothing else, i.e. no partition table if
>> not needed for u-boot), which can be written with common disk
>> image handling tools. The latter would make life a lot easier
>> for people setting up the installer from Windows for example.
>>
>>> Providing complete u-boot images for each platform would be 19 images
>>> for jessie, though each one is fairly small (each between
>>> 0.5-1M). Though I don't think we've consolidated all documentation
>>> needed to generate all those platforms with the correct offsets (though
>>> many are all the same, such as sunxi).
>>
>> I only know those for sunxi and i.MX6:
>>
>> - sunxi:
>> combined image (SPL + main image) at offset 8kB
>>
>> - i.MX6:
>> SPL at offet 1kB
>> main image at offset 42kB
>>
>> @debian-arm: Could somebody provide this information for i.MX53
>> and OMAP?
>
>
> omap bootrom's with the introduction of the omap4 can be dd'ed liked
> sunxi/i.mx5/5..
>
> dd if=MLO of=/dev/sdX count=1 seek=1 conv=notrunc bs=128k
> dd if=u-boot.img of=/dev/sdX count=2 seek=1 conv=notrunc bs=384k
>
> That just leaves the omap3 family (BeagleBoard (omap34/35xx) &
> BeagleBoard xM (omap36xx/DM3730) stuck with reading the MLO/u-boot.img
> on "boot"* partition.
>
> * mainline u-boot now has patches to enable extX boot vs fat boot, but
> it's an either "or" situation based on sram memory size..
Which means, one base "netboot.img" with a big boot.scr script could
support many of the sunxi/i.mx/omap boards.
User:
dd base image -> card
dd u-boot -> card
boot into d-i
Regards,
--
Robert Nelson
http://www.rcn-ee.com/
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