[U-Boot] Starting WindowsCE

[Ken.Fuchs at bench.com]

Andreas Geisreiter wrote:

> I use U-Boot with a Marvell PXA270 CPU. And now I will start 
> WindowsCE with it. I have loaded the nk.bin image via TFTP to
> the RAM but I need the entry point of the image. And I don't
> know anything about starting WinCE at the moment. Has anybody
> experience with starting WinCE or has anybody done this
> with U-Boot?

It is quite easy to use U-Boot to chainload Eboot which boots
the CE kernel NK.  The easiest way to do this (prior to the
patch that supports the NK.bin image) is using nb0 (raw
executable) images, namely Eboot.nb0 and NK.nb0.  Use U-Boot
to download these images into SDRAM and modify Eboot to use
the NK.nb0 image previously loaded into SDRAM by U-Boot.  An
extra bonus for booting CE via both U-Boot and Eboot is using
U-Boot's image (bootm with the boot feature disabled)
decompression features.  For large CE kernels, booting a gz
compressed NK.nb0 could be significantly faster than booting
an NK.bin image, because the gz image can be about 1/3 the
size of the NK.bin image.  Trivially changes to the Eboot and
even NK sources may be required to make this work.

Look also into the U-Boot patches that support NK.bin directly.
These patches may be faster than the approach I described above.
The 2008-Aug-22 06:43 UTC patch by Ryan Chen has already been
mentioned.  There is also a much earlier patch by R&D4 dated
2008-Feb-02 16:57 UTC.  (Not sure whether or not the patch by
Chen is based on the patch by R&D4.)

Sincerely,

Ken Fuchs