[U-Boot] U-Boot 2009.11.1 USB Issue and Building U-Boot 2013.07

[Andreas Bießmann]

Dear Chuck Wical,

On 09/03/2013 10:53 PM, Chuck Wical wrote:
> First I am fairly new to U-Boot but over the last 2 weeks I have been going
> through the README files and anything else I can find that would help
> resolve the issue I have.  Here is a recap:
> 
> Currently the project I am working on was setup with U-Boot 2009-11-01 and
> works just fine with one exception.  I was asked to find a solution where
> our field support engineers could recover if a firmware update failed
> causing our board to no longer boot.  Basically it cycles through RomBOOT
> and U-Boot.  As I looked through the environment variables and commands I
> came across the USB subsystem and found I could use fatload.  With our
> system there are three files I need to load from USB, these are uImage,
> etc.jff2 and rootfs.ext2.gz.uboot.

you could also use fatload on mmc. Do you have some mmc in your device?

> I found if I used tftp these files transferred correctly and the board would
> boot with the new files.  I thought the solution was found and I could
> simply setup the same files using USB through environment variables.  The
> script worked but the problem was when it tried to load rootfs into RAM it
> would cause a CPU reset and RomBOOT to start.  At first I thought there was
> something wrong with the script so I tried to load the file by typing it the
> command but got the same result.

I tested the 2009.11.1 release on my 9263ek here and can confirm, that
the usb support there is really buggy. It doesn't support current
storage devices, seems to behave differently every time I access the
device (timeouts, ...).
I managed however to load a 16MiB file via usb storage successfully.

> Command:
> 
> usb start
> 
> fatload usb 0 $(loadaddr) rootfs.ext2.gz.uboot  where loadaddr is the same
> address used by tftp.

That's in general correct.

> My first question is, is there a solution for this issue using U-Boot
> 2009.11.1? This version builds currently within our project.

As these are my first steps with 2009.11.1 and usb storage I can't say
it. You could backport current usb stack to have better support. On the
other hand porting your board forward isn't that hard.

> Second question is I downloaded U-Boot 2013.07 but noticed huge change in
> the build process.  I figured out the patches I need along with the AT91
> configuration for our board.  We are using the arm926ej6 processor with a
> board similar to at91sam9260ek.  When I try to build I get the
> hardware.h:49:3 error: #error "Unsupported AT91 processor" message.  When I

HAve a look at 9260ek config, it is still in current releases and builds
at least. I rarely test the built on real hardware, at the moment I only
have an sam9263ek handy.

> look at the header file I see where it fails but I don't understand why
> since I do have a matching define.  For some reason hardware.h is not seeing
> this define and I am stumped as to why.  So any suggestions on how to solve
> or figure this out would be appreciated.

If you plan to integrate your patches into mainline, we could help to
adopt them where needed.

Best regards

Andreas Bießmann