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

[Benoît Thébaudeau]

On Thursday, December 13, 2012 11:41:29 PM, Benoît Thébaudeau wrote:
> On Thursday, December 13, 2012 5:01:00 PM, Bernhard Walle wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> There are several possible solutions. First, you need an SPL because
> the ROM
> bootloader does not handle all bad blocks properly, especially if the
> bootloader
> image spans several blocks. You have the choice between the old NAND
> SPL, which
> is being obsoleted, and the new generic SPL, which still requires
> some
> refinements to support NAND boot on i.MX. NAND SPL is currently the
> quickest
> solution, but generic SPL is the long term solution.
> 
> For my board, I went with NAND SPL, which generates a u-boot-nand.bin
> file to
> flash. I had to customize the linker script and the startup files to
> add the DCD
> stuff to the image. Another solution could have been to generate a
> u-boot.imx
> for NAND SPL, which I will do for generic SPL at some point.

Also, contrary to usual u-boot images, u-boot.imx should be flashed at offset
0x400, which may be surprising for NAND.

Best regards,
Benoît