[U-Boot-Users] Startup for ARM boards?

[Steven Scholz]

Marius,

>>>>I will have a AT91RM9200 based board real soon now. But apparently the
>>>>eval board AT91RM9200DK uses a different approach. They have a
>>>>separate urloader to decompress and copy an U-Boot image into RAM and
>>>>then jump there...
> 
> Actually this "urloader" is called Thunderboot and is a ripped version
> of ARMboot (a practice which seems to be quite fashionable these
> days.)  I never got round to asking them for the sources, nor do I
> understand why they concealed it so pathetically :-) The flash images
> even contain references to ARMboot. Maybe you want to have a go at
> them?

Ehm. Nope. That's not what I meant.
They replace Thunderboot by their so called "AT91RM9200-Boot". Then they build a 
U-Boot version for the eval board AT91RM9200DK and gzip it. The AT91RM9200-Boot 
and the zipped version of AT91RM9200-U-Boot are stored in flash. Now all that 
AT91RM9200-Boot does when power-on is init the hardware (especially SDRAM), 
decompress u-boot.gz into SDRAM and jump to it.

Atmel said:

"We chose, to put a compressed boot due to memory mapping constraints.
We need to keep a sector for environment variables the 8Kbyte-size sector is
enough."

IMHO this wasn't nessesary at all since they do seem to have flash with a few 
small sectors. But nevermind.

They even provide a "AT91RM9200-Loader" which could be used to download the above 
files via the DEBUG UNIT (DBGU).

I got these sources from Atmel. Now that I have these source I hope I can get 
this working on my board as well. Then when this two-(or three)-step version 
works I want to make U-Boot working like for all the other plattforms: init 
SDRAM, relocate and start.

Ok?

Steven