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

[Chuck Wical]

Hello Andreas,

Thanks for the reply!

> 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?

We do have mmc slots available on the board but U-Boot is not configured to
use mmc.  I don't know why that is as it would have made perfect sense to do
so.  In the meantime,  I am trying to figure out how to enable mmc but
running into a little difficulty.  To put it simply, I just do not know
where to enable it or where to look.  I will keep trying but a little
guidance would be very much appreciated.

> 
> > 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.

The size of file I am trying to load is <7MiB but with your comments above
it makes me wonder if a timeout is occurring thus forcing the reboot.

> 
> > 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.

I will take a look and yes, we are using real hardware and I do not have
access to a sam9263ek either.

> 
> > 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.

I have no plans to incorporate the patches into mainline as they seem very
specific to our board and configuration.

> 
> Best regards
> 
> Andreas Bießmann

Cheers

Chuck Wical