[U-Boot] Booting an i.MX53 from NAND with u-boot

[Bernhard Walle]

Hello,

we have a custom board with an Freescale i.MX 53 CPU and NAND flash
(MT29F1G08ABADAWP if it matters). It's quite similar to the i.MX 53 LOCO
("Quick Start Board"), but the LOCO has no Flash and only boots from
Micro SD card.

I'm using u-boot 2012.07 from mainline with some additional patches,
notably the patch to add i.M53 support to mxc_nand driver from
Benoît Thébaudeau that has been posted on the mailing list recently.

When booting from SD card, everything is fine, i.e. I can read and write
the flash from u-boot. And also from Linux. However, the goal is to boot
from NAND. :)

I used the kobs-ng-11.09.01 software from Freescale to write the
bootloader to NAND, since it also writes the necessary boot header and
has support for bad pages. Is it correct to use 'u-boot.bin' (and not
'u-boot.imx')?

There's some information floating around in the internet that I need
some proprietary tool to convert 'u-boot.bin' to some 'streaming'
format. But that information is for i.MX 28 and not for i.MX 53. I found
also tools/mxsboot.c in the u-boot sources which seems to be a
replacement for kobs-ng.

Some ideas what we're doing wrong or how to debug this? Of course it can
be also the boot GPIO settings, but I wanted to ask here if the
procedure looks correct from u-boot side.


Regards,
Bernhard