[U-Boot] Proposal to add NAND-boot support for Sunxi SPL

[Hans de Goede]

Hi,

On 25-05-15 20:35, Hans de Goede wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 22-05-15 09:04, Roy Spliet wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> For my set-up I made use of Boris Brezillon's sunxi-nand tree[1], or actually I rebased his patches on top of 4.0rc7. This basically adds support for NAND-chip partitioning, ECC and randomisation. Docs for the DT specification in Documentation/devicetree/bindings/mtd/sunxi-nand.txt , and an example can be found in arch/arm/boot/dts/sun7i-a20-cubietruck.dts . [2] lists the acceptable configuration options for the boot and boot_rescue partitions, make sure to pick one of these (which should be no problem for MLC-type nand). The ECC mode for these boot partitions is called hw_syndrome.
>>
>> Assuming you now have a Linux set-up kernel based on this tree with NAND support on an MMC, for U-boot what you should currently do is:
>> 1) in include/configs/sunxi-common.h, adjust the parameters <CONFIG_NAND_SUNXI_>PAGE_SIZE, ECC_STEP, ECC_STRENGTH to match your NAND chip and DT configuration.
>> 2) Build
>> 3) Use your MMC to flash u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin onto NAND:
>> # flash_erase /dev/mtd0
>> # nandwrite -p /dev/mtd0 u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin
>> 4) Reboot without the MMC card and see U-boot load
>
> Ok, it took me way longer then I wanted (see below) but I've this
> working now. It is cool to see u-boot load from nand :)
>>
>> That should be all.
>>
>> @Alex: To answer your question specifically: It's likely that the parameters in sunxi-common.h mentioned above might not match your NAND-chip configuration in the Linux kernel. I can't tell you precisely how to fetch these details from the 3.4 kernel, sorry. I recall Daniel using 24-bit strength ECC with otherwise equal parameters, but perhaps he can help you with this better than I can.
>
> Alex, could it be that you are writing the nand using
> a (rebased) version of bbrezillon's sunxi-nand-next branch ?
>
> I started with that too because it is much newer and contains
> various bug fixes, but it seems that it also contains a new
> bug causing it to write the NAND in such a way that the BROM
> and u-boot SPL code will not read it.
>
> I've just pushed a rebased version of the sunxi-nand branch of
> Boris here:
>
> https://github.com/jwrdegoede/linux-sunxi/commits/sunxi-nand-experiment
>
> And that works for me, where as before I got the exact same errors
> trying to fel load a nand enabled spl.
>
> I'm working on merging over all the changes from the sunxi-nand-next
> branch onto my working sunxi-nand-experiment branch 1 by 1 until
> I find the one which causes the breakage...

Ok, so quick update the breakage was caused by this commit:

https://github.com/bbrezillon/linux-sunxi/commit/7f7324bc6170a45742352070fb45170779a3611c

When it was rebased someone (Boris I guess) forgot to remove the
"chip->read_buf(mtd, NULL, ecc->size);" line at line 1075 (after the patch) and
likewise the "chip->write_buf(mtd, buf + (i * ecc->size), ecc->size);" line at
line 1161. With these 2 lines removed the sunxi-nand-next branch from Boris,
rebased on 4.1-rc1 can write the nand boot parts and the brom / spl can load
the spl / resp. u-boot.bin from there (on a cubieboard2).

I've also tried to get this code running on a cubieboard (non 2 so A10 rather then
A20), the SPL loads fine there (indicating that the kernel bits work), but then
I get:

U-Boot SPL 2015.07-rc1-00287-g050de86-dirty (May 25 2015 - 22:28:19)
DRAM: 1024 MiB
CPU: 1008000000Hz, AXI/AHB/APB: 3/2/2
Nand initialised
NAND timeout reading data
NAND timeout reading data
NAND timeout reading data
NAND timeout reading data
NAND timeout reading data
NAND timeout reading data
...

Which seems to indicate a problem with the SPL nand code on the A10. I'll investigate
this further tomorrow evening.

A cleaned up version of my kernel work on this is available in my
sunxi-wip branch.

Regards,

Hans