[U-Boot-Users] Problems porting U-boot to custom board

[michael.firth at bt.com]

Apologies for the Newbie question, but I'm not really sure where else to
ask about this.

We've designed a board based around the Freescale MPC8343 processor, and
are trying to get U-boot running on it.

We have used an Embedded Planet evaluation board as the starting point
for our design. Unfortunately it seems that, although Embedded Planet
have ported U-Boot to their board, they haven't pushed the files to
support it upstream. Thus the only version of U-Boot I have that will
support this evaluation board is 1.1.4, which I know is ancient.

The system seems to be freezing very early on in the boot process (line
171 of the mpc83xx start.S file) while it seems to be doing some flash
remapping operations. What seems to be happening, using GDB and an
Abatron, is that it gets to this line, and then 'teleports' to a
function called 'hung()'.

The specific line that is giving the problem "lis r4,
(CFG_MONITOR_BASE)@h" looks to just be loading a register with a value,
but I don't really know PowerPC assembler.

I guess this leads me to four initial questions:
1) Is there any obvious gotcha that I'm likely to have fallen in to that
would cause this behaviour?
2) Given that this is an old version of U-boot, I'd like to move to a
more recent version. How difficult is it likely to be to port the board
support from u-boot-1.1.4 to the latest recommended version?
3) What is the latest recommended version? - I've seen references on
here to V1.2.0, but the latest available from the FTP area is 1.1.6.
4) If I do manage to port the Embedded Planet support in to the latest
U-Boot, would I be able to push that upstream, and, if I did so, would I
have to support that code?

Thanks in advance

Michael Firth