[U-Boot] Beagle-XM: u-boot SPL fat support (was Re: [opensuse-arm] Beagleboard Xm CPU speed)

[Alexander Graf]

On 19.03.2013, at 18:01, Nishanth Menon wrote:

> Change in subject.
> Original thread start:
> http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-arm/2013-03/msg00076.html
> 
> On 17:15-20130319, Guillaume Gardet wrote:
>> 
>> Le 19/03/2013 17:04, Nishanth Menon a écrit :
>>> On 08:47-20130319, gary wrote:
>>>> Just a FYI, here is the the boot text dumped to the serial port. It
>>>> indicates a 1GHz max clock rate, but maybe that is just a
>>>> "capability" of the board (as in a designation) and not a parameter
>>>> that has been set.
>>>> 
>>>> I see in the boot text there is a way to interrupt the automatic
>>>> boot, which I presume is a way to set parameters. Could someone give
>>>> me what such a line would look like for forcing the mpurate?
>>>> 
>>>> ---------------------------------------
>>>> Texas Instruments X-Loader 1.5.0 (Sep  8 2012 - 02:21:18)
>>>> Beagle xM
>>>> Reading boot sector
>>>> Error: reading boot sector
>>>> fat load failed, trying ext2
>>>> Loading u-boot.bin from mmc
>>> Why are we still using old x-loader - we should be using SPL MLO from
>>> u-boot master - it works straight on beagleXM.
>> 
>> Our last tests with SPL and latest u-boot were unsuccessful! And we have to port ext2 support to it because we have no FAT partition.
> Quote from an internal query I just did:
> "There shouldn't be a
> case where xM has memory that X-Loader works for that SPL did not.

The issue was that with SPL and proper upstream u-boot from ~fall last year, my beagleboard xm was unstable. It constantly crashed. So I reverted back to the old x-loader booting, as that kept things stable.

> There _may_ be a UART issue that needs work-arounding however.  And of
> course if they used mainline they could pretty easily do RAW for
> SPL/U-Boot.img and then do everything else with ext2/3/4 and ignore FAT.

The "default" that we stuck with so far (though we can certainly change that) is to keep u-boot as a file in ext2, so that it can easily be updated. That maybe wasn't the most clever decision and going with raw is the way to go, but it's what we do today.


Alex