[A10] Getting u-boot onto freshly partitioned Nand for booting Linux

[timo.s...@gmail.com]

Hi all,

this is a cross-post from the PengPod forums and my first mail to this group. Sorry should I have misinterpreted the topic of this group.

I want to install Archlinux to the Nand of my PengPod 700 (Allwinner A10 SoC) which previously contained an Android OS.

Following this guide, I partitioned the Nand using nand-part, formatted the two partitions (DOS and ext4, respectively), filled them with the contents of my SD card and built my own u-boot (lichee-dev branch with modified header).

My tablet fails to boot this (screen remains completely black) and unfortunately, I have no means to get a serial console output.

The aforementioned guide mentions copying u-boot.img as a file to the first (DOS) partition of the Nand ("linux" subfolder). Is that really all that is needed to get u-boot loaded? Can the earlier boot stages find it just like this? Where to put boot.scr and script.bin? Can these be the same as when booting my SD card?

Any hints are greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Timo

[John S]

As I recall, U-boot does not support boot from nand.

John

---

From: "timo.s...@gmail.com" <timo.s...@gmail.com>
To: linux...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Monday, 23 September 2013, 10:04
Subject: [linux-sunxi] [A10] Getting u-boot onto freshly partitioned Nand for booting Linux

[timo.s...@gmail.com]

Hi John,

On Monday, September 23, 2013 11:13:25 AM UTC+2, John S wrote:

As I recall, U-boot does not support boot from nand.

John

I read that u-boot's lichee-dev branch does support booting from Nand and that's the one I built. It's just that I don't know how to install it...

Kind regards,

Timo

[Oliver Schinagl]

Boot recovery (or android), then from your PC:

adb push u-boot.bin /tmp
adb shell
mount /dev/block/nanda /boot
mv /boot/linux/u-boot.bin /boot/linux/u-boot.bin.orig
cp /tmp/u-boot.bin /boot/linux/u-boot.bin
umount /boot
reboot
pray to the gods of u-boot.

oliver
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Timo
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
> Groups "linux-sunxi" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send
> an email to linux-sunxi...@googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

[timo.s...@gmail.com]

Hi Oliver,

adb push u-boot.bin /tmp
adb shell
mount /dev/block/nanda /boot
mv /boot/linux/u-boot.bin /boot/linux/u-boot.bin.orig
cp /tmp/u-boot.bin /boot/linux/u-boot.bin
umount /boot
reboot
pray to the gods of u-boot.

oliver

I already tried this, but it didn't boot. How should I create u-boot.bin? From the lychee-dev branch? Does BROM automatically look for this file in the first partition in the linux subdirectory? There's nothing to put before the first partition so that u-boot.img will be loaded? Do I need to modify the kernel somehow so it can find its root partition? Does the kernel (uImage) still go to the root partition of the first (DOS) partition?

Again, thanks for all your help!

Timo

[Oliver Schinagl]

On 23-09-13 13:00, timo.s...@gmail.com wrote:
> Hi Oliver,
>
> adb push u-boot.bin /tmp
> adb shell
> mount /dev/block/nanda /boot
> mv /boot/linux/u-boot.bin /boot/linux/u-boot.bin.orig
> cp /tmp/u-boot.bin /boot/linux/u-boot.bin
> umount /boot
> reboot
> pray to the gods of u-boot.
>
> oliver
>
>
> I already tried this, but it didn't boot. How should I create

> u-boot.bin? From the lychee-dev branch? Does BROM *automatically* look

> for this file in the first partition in the linux subdirectory? There's

No.

If you want to boot from NAND, you are at the mercy of the AW boot devil.

Boot procedure is as follows, BROM -> boot0 -> boot1 -> boot.axf ->
(linux/boot.ini I think) -> u-boot.bin -> uImage

Could this be easier? sure, send a patch to integrate the mtd stuff into
our u-boot ;)

So why do you want to replace stock u-boot? You can build lichee-dev's
u-boot and should work just fine for sun4i and sun5i (memory issues
aside). If it doesn't boot, then something else may be wrong. I just
built it yesterday and came up fine (except for printing debug output
that I was after ;)

Oliver

[timo.s...@gmail.com]

Hi again,

> I already tried this, but it didn't boot. How should I create
> u-boot.bin? From the lychee-dev branch? Does BROM *automatically* look
> for this file in the first partition in the linux subdirectory? There's
No.

If you want to boot from NAND, you are at the mercy of the AW boot devil.

Boot procedure is as follows, BROM -> boot0 -> boot1 -> boot.axf ->
(linux/boot.ini I think) -> u-boot.bin -> uImage

Could this be easier? sure, send a patch to integrate the mtd stuff into
our u-boot ;)

So why do you want to replace stock u-boot? You can build lichee-dev's
u-boot and should work just fine for sun4i and sun5i (memory issues
aside). If it doesn't boot, then something else may be wrong. I just
built it yesterday and came up fine (except for printing debug output
that I was after ;)

 
thanks for all your time and patience!

My intention was not to replace stock u-boot, I meant to repartition my Nand so that I can make full use of it and install Archlinux instead of the pre-existing Android. Now I'm trying to find the missing pieces so I can get it booting and you're being very helpful with that!

I know that BROM is in read-only memory, but I don't know about boot0, boot1 and boot.axf. I also don't have a linux/boot.ini. If you still have the time and patience, could you tell me whether I might have destroyed those during Nand repartitioning and if so, where I can get those from so I can restore them?

Kind regards,

Timo

[Michal Suchanek]

You don't wipe nand to install linux. You replace parts of the
original Android with linux.

this http://linux-sunxi.org/Building_on_Debian#Installing_to_nand is
how I did it some time back.

Unfortunately, if you don't have serial it's very hard to tell what
went wrong when your system does not boot.

HTH

Michal

[Oliver Schinagl]

As michael said, you don't supposed to wipe them, you replace everything
EXCEPT nanda, as that is your boot partition. You can check the binary
boards section on github for some reference files, but ideally you need
to extract those from your (livesuit)image.

linux/boot.ini was a guess, could be linux.ini or whatever, it's an ini,
maybe even in the root, I don't recall.

How did you break your nanda? boot1 will look for the first partition
and it will only read it if it is fat. With the proper files on it it
should work (tm).

oliver

>
> Kind regards,
>
> Timo

[John S]

Try
http://linux-sunxi.org/BROM
and its relatives for info.

John

---

From: "timo.s...@gmail.com" <timo.s...@gmail.com>
To: linux...@googlegroups.com

Cc: olive...@schinagl.nl
Sent: Monday, 23 September 2013, 12:32
Subject: Re: [linux-sunxi] [A10] Getting u-boot onto freshly partitioned Nand for booting Linux

[snip]

[timo.s...@gmail.com]

Hi Oliver,

As michael said, you don't supposed to wipe them, you replace everything
EXCEPT nanda, as that is your boot partition. You can check the binary
boards section on github for some reference files, but ideally you need
to extract those from your (livesuit)image.

linux/boot.ini was a guess, could be linux.ini or whatever, it's an ini,
maybe even in the root, I don't recall.

How did you break your nanda? boot1 will look for the first partition
and it will only read it if it is fat. With the proper files on it it
should work (tm).

Ok, I understand my best bet is to get a copy of the original Android Nand contents, put them back on Nand, then modify the Nand partitioning making sure I don't touch nanda or anything before that. I had hoped there would be a more "straigtforward" way, but at least now I know what to do. Again, thank you very much, Oliver.

My repartitioning itself probably broke nothing but as it didn't work, I thought it couldn't harm trying to dd u-boot into /dev/nand the way I did with the SD card... How wrong I was :D

@John S:

I will read up on those articles, thanks to you, too!

Kind regards,

Timo

[Nedko Arnaudov]

Last night I played with the same problem. I had my nand completly
zeroed and tried to boot a linux kernel from it. What i did was to
create a new partition with nand-part (from sunxi-tools). Then I
formatted it with vfat. For some reason, the nanda device was showing
with incorrect size in /proc/partitions but I ignored this issue for
now. Then I've put boot.axf on it (the boot1 code was complaining it was
missing) and boot1 complained about linux/u-boot.bin missing and i've
put the one that i used for booting from the SD card. The boot resulted
in this message:

boot1: bad boot image magic, maybe not a boot.img?

Web search pointed me to
http://www.cubieforums.com/index.php?topic=504.0 where I've found that
there is u-boot branch for booting from nand. Unfortunately that branch
didn't support my device (A20 olinuxino) and the merge of sunxi branch
generated non-trivial merge conflicts. So I gave up and went to bed :)

In long term, i'd like to eliminate boot.axf (a closed source binary
AFAIK) and have completely open-source booting, except the things that
cannot be reprogrammed at all (BROM?).

HTH

--
Nedko Arnaudov <GnuPG KeyID: 5D1B58ED>

[Oliver Schinagl]

Currently, you can only boot fully opensource from SD (or eMMC). NAND
booting is possible via the lichee uboot and while fully opensource
aswell, nand support in the form of allwinners' libnand will not ever
get merged.

Instead there is some preliminary work to do all that via MTD which will
be merged at some point. But some work is required and some issues
ironed out.

oliver
>
> HTH
>

[timo.s...@gmail.com]

Hi Nedko,

 
after hours of googling and experimenting, I finally made some progress:

I downloaded the original Android LiveSuit image for my tablet and managed to extract its files via the awimage tool from awutils. The image contains a mbr.fex and boot.fex, which I hope I can restore to the Nand using dd.

boot.fex is specifically interesting, since it is a mountable dos filesystem which contains boot.axf, boot.ini and consorts.

Hope this information can help you, too.

Kind regards,

Timo

[Oliver Schinagl]

> to extract its files via the awimage tool from awutils<https://github.com/Ithamar/awutils>.

> The image contains a mbr.fex and boot.fex, which I hope I can restore to
> the Nand using dd.

Note, you can't (easily) modify boot0 or boot1 (or the mbr/partition
table) as that is all outside of the addressable nand.

Basically (not exactly true if i'm not mistaken) /dev/nand == /dev/nanda;

So you can't use fdisk on /dev/nand; you can't use other things on nand
as you are used to. That's why we nand_part tool, it modifies the
partition table outside of the addressable nand space.

Boot0 and boot1 prefix that area, so you can't accidentally erase that
easily :)

>
> boot.fex is specifically interesting, since it is a mountable dos
> filesystem which contains boot.axf, boot.ini and consorts.

To repair your nanda, that's what you need.

make first partition fat, extract that content (copy probably your best
bet) to there and it should magically start working again.

oliver

[Patrick Wood]

The mbr is exposed on the first 4K of /dev/nand (64K on A20). /dev/nand[a1] is the area right after the mbr.

[timo.s...@gmail.com]

Hi Oliver,

On Tuesday, September 24, 2013 12:14:01 AM UTC+2, Oliver Schinagl wrote:

Note, you can't (easily) modify boot0 or boot1 (or the mbr/partition
table) as that is all outside of the addressable nand.

Basically (not exactly true if i'm not mistaken) /dev/nand == /dev/nanda;

So you can't use fdisk on /dev/nand; you can't use other things on nand
as you are used to. That's why we nand_part tool, it modifies the
partition table outside of the addressable nand space.

Boot0 and boot1 prefix that area, so you can't accidentally erase that
easily :)
>
> boot.fex is specifically interesting, since it is a mountable dos
> filesystem which contains boot.axf, boot.ini and consorts.
To repair your nanda, that's what you need.

make first partition fat, extract that content (copy probably your best
bet) to there and it should magically start working again.

oliver

 
I made some progress. I dd'ed mbr.fex from the extracted LiveSuit image into /dev/nand. After a reboot, I got back my old partitioning from when Android was installed.

Next, I used nand-part to repartition the nand again, this time making sure I wouldn't touch the mbr part and keep the the first (bootloader) partition at the same size:

nand-part /dev/nand 2048 'bootloader 32768' 'root 0'

Then, I dd'ed the bootloader.fex from the extracted LiveSuit image into /dev/nanda and called mkfs.ext4 on /dev/nandb.

I added my uImage and u-boot.bin (from lichee-dev branch) to the linux subdirectory of the bootloader partition, my script.bin to the root of that partition and filled the ext 4 root partition.

After a reboot, the screen turns on and I can see the Android logo in the center of the screen. It's not much, but at least it's a start :)

If anyone has some hints on how I can debug the startup from here, I'd be glad to hear them.

Kind greetings,

Timo

[timo.s...@gmail.com]

Finally made it!

While looking at the modifications I made for u-boot, I realized that script.bin and uImage belong to the same folder, i.e. the root folder of the bootloader partition. Moving uImage, the system now boots perfectly fine.

Thanks for all your input!

Timo

[Henrik Nordström]

mån 2013-09-23 klockan 02:04 -0700 skrev timo.s...@gmail.com:

> I want to install Archlinux to the Nand of my PengPod 700 (Allwinner
> A10 SoC) which previously contained an Android OS.
>
> Following this guide, I partitioned the Nand using nand-part,
> formatted the two partitions (DOS and ext4, respectively), filled them
> with the contents of my SD card and built my own u-boot (lichee-dev
> branch with modified header).

At the moment you need allwinner bootloader on nand. The easiest way to
get this is to livesuit install a suitable Android image for your
device, then save a copy of nanda files, repartition, format, restore
nanda files and install your rootfs.

> My tablet fails to boot this (screen remains completely black) and
> unfortunately, I have no means to get a serial console output.

With no serial you are both blind and hands tied behind your back..

> The aforementioned guide mentions copying u-boot.img as a file to the
> first (DOS) partition of the Nand ("linux" subfolder). Is that really
> all that is needed to get u-boot loaded?

No. That assumes you are only replacing an already existing u-boot.bin
with a copy you have compiled if you want.

You also need the other files that are in nanda, and the Allwinner
initial bootloader need to be installed in the nand bootblocks by
livesuit (if you had Android running then this part is done).

> Can the earlier boot stages find it just like this? Where to put
> boot.scr and script.bin? Can these be the same as when booting my SD
> card?

The initial bootloader looks for boot.axf, which reads boot.ini and
loads linux/u-boot.bin if boot.ini says so. But first of all it loads
script.bin.

Note: There is no boot.scr support in lichee-dev branch. Not hard to add
if needed, but no one have bothered doing it.

Regards
Henrik

[hunter hu]

Hi Timo,

I had the same issue I could not make the NAND boot work. With the u-boot.bin from lichee-dev branch, my tablet stuck at the logo screen:

1> which board did you build for your tablet?

2> what modifications have you made, you said with header modifications?

3> Anything regarding DRAM settings needed? we needed  a dram file in our sunxi branch.

4> where in the code does it indicate to configure where we put uImage and script.bin?

Great thanks in advance,

-Hunter

[Timo Schmiade]

Hi Hunter,

> 1> which board did you build for your tablet?

make CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabihf- sun4i

> 2> what modifications have you made, you said with header modifications?

In the file include/configs/sun4i.h, I modified the CONFIG_BOOTCOMMAND define:

#define CONFIG_BOOTCOMMAND                 \
  "setenv bootargs "                       \
    "root=/dev/nandb "                     \
    "console=ttyS0,115200 "                \
    "console=tty0 "                        \
    "rootfstype=ext4 "                     \
    "ro "                                  \
    "quiet; "                              \
  "fatload nand 0 0x43000000 script.bin; " \
  "fatload nand 0 0x48000000 uImage; "     \
  "bootm 0x48000000\0"

> 3> Anything regarding DRAM settings needed? we needed  a dram file in our sunxi branch.

I didn't make any other modifications to u-boot. Please be aware that this is a hobby project for me :)

> 4> where in the code does it indicate to configure where we put uImage and script.bin?

Should be answered by 2, i.e. root directory of /dev/nandb in my case. I think the approach of hard-coding the locations and devices into u-boot is a bad one, but at the time I was investigating, it seemed to be the only one that worked. Although I read there were efforts made to unify the lichee-dev branch with its master.

Kind regards,

Timo

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups "linux-sunxi" group.
> To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/linux-sunxi/omgs3skJYDI/unsubscribe.
> To unsubscribe from this group and all of its topics, send an email to linux-sunxi...@googlegroups.com.

[Patrick Wood]

Looks to me like this is loading script.bin and uImage from nanda.

[Timo Schmiade]

Hi Patrick,

> Looks to me like this is loading script.bin and uImage from nanda.

thanks for pointing this out, you're of course right! nandb contains
my root filesystem, nanda is the boot partition.

On Sat, Mar 8, 2014 at 3:24 PM, Patrick Wood <patric...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Looks to me like this is loading script.bin and uImage from nanda.
>

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups "linux-sunxi" group.
> To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/linux-sunxi/omgs3skJYDI/unsubscribe.
> To unsubscribe from this group and all of its topics, send an email to linux-sunxi...@googlegroups.com.

> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[hunter hu]

Hi Timo,

Thanks for the detailed answer to my questions, really appreciate that.

I have done the same thing, still I am stuck at the logo screen, feels like there is something else is missing in my case.

1> I don't see any serial output from NAND boot, did you see anything on the serial console if you were using serial output?

2> anyone knows if the logo has been displayed, does it imply that u-boot.bin got loaded at all?

I think in my case, the question is why u-boot.bin built from sun5i_a13 with the CONFIG_BOOTCOMMAND modification doesn't print any output at all?  in the common/main.c:

205 static inline int abortboot(int bootdelay)                                                                                                                                   

 206 {

 207     int abort = 0;  

 208 

 209 #ifdef CONFIG_MENUPROMPT

 210     printf(CONFIG_MENUPROMPT);

 211 #else

 212     printf("Hit any key to stop autoboot: %2d ", bootdelay);

 213 #endif

would always print "Hit any key to stop autoboot:", even if something went wrong later? but I saw nothing from console, (UART1 that is I am using and good with SD boot).

Still baffled, :-(

Regards,

-Hunter 

[Patrick Wood]

Is your serial debug port on uart0?

[Patrick Wood]

Oh, I see it is uart1. Did you build uboot to use uart1 for console?

[Neal Peacock]

Here is a link for what I did on the PengPod where we used the original u-boot from Android.  http://pengpod.com/pengwiki/index.php?title=Install_Linaro_to_the_internal_flash

The only trick not listed was the u-boot environment had to be signed, I can't remember the name of the tool but its in the u-boot repo.

I think the first logo was displayed by boot1, before u-boot runs.

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "linux-sunxi" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to linux-sunxi...@googlegroups.com.

[hunter hu]

Hi Neal,

The link seems broken while I was trying to get the image: wget http://pengpod.com/dl/images/pengpod1000-linaro-flashcard-2013.03.29.img.tar.gz

However, I can set things up by following the same logic, but I need to confirm one change, for nandb, what changes need to be made? I plan to edit binary image out from my board, there are actually 2 entries for the environment,

one setup root=/dev/nandc

the other setup root=/dev/nandd

according to your notes, we will dd uImage into nandc, so say, if I will use nandj (which is 5G in size) as the rootfs, should I change the both nandc and nandd to nandj or just nandd to nandj?

Thanks,

-Hunter

[Neal Peacock]

Hello,

Seems like the structure was

/dev/nandb < u-boot.env with magic signing value
/dev/nandc < the linux kernel, just dd copied on, make sure to clear with zero in case yours its smaller
/dev/nandX < the root partition, which was defined in the u-boot.env, so you could make it whatever you want, as long as it matches your env file.  If nandj is 5Gb then that is what I would use in my hacky approach.

So is that more clear?  You'll need to put your linux kernel in nandc, your adjusted uboot.env in nandb and your rootfs on a new partition on nandj

I'll try to find the actual script and old images tonight.  I was having a lot of trouble uploading large files and hadn't tried in awhile.

Thanks.

[hunter hu]

Hi Neal,

Thanks for that.

I have no idea about the magic signing value, I have 3 questions and comments:

1> If I just use the original nandb.img which was dd out of the nand itself, will that still be needed?

2> if I do create a magic signing value again, how would I do that?

3> would this why my previous lichee-dev u-boot.bin doesn't play well with boot0/boot1? did I miss any magic value there?

Thanks,

-Hunter

[Neal Peacock]

Answers in line.  Thanks

On Mar 9, 2014 11:34 AM, "hunter hu" <hunte...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Neal,
>
> Thanks for that.
>
> I have no idea about the magic signing value, I have 3 questions and comments:
>
> 1> If I just use the original nandb.img which was dd out of the nand itself, will that still be needed?

No but I think you will have to change at least one parameter.  I've got to find my notes on it..

> 2> if I do create a magic signing value again, how would I do that?

Its in the tools directory of a linux-sunxi u-boot repo. 

https://github.com/linux-sunxi/u-boot-sunxi/blob/sunxi/tools/mkenvimage.c

Again I've got some notes somewhere on how to use it.

> 3> would this why my previous lichee-dev u-boot.bin doesn't play well with boot0/boot1? did I miss any magic value there?

There is a uboot signer in tools as well so maybe.  When booting from band I stuck with the included Android u-boot.