[U-Boot] Olinuxino A13 NAND boot (Sunxi)

[Kevin Kowalewski]

Hi,

I've been trying for a few days now to get u-boot loaded onto NAND and
actually booting here on my Olinuxino A13 which is an Allwinner CPU so the
sunxi side of things. I've had no such luck using the 2016-01 RC2 nor the
CHIP u-Boot branch, which is based off the the R8. My understanding is SPL
replaces boot0 / boot1 for Allwinner/sunxi boards.

The board uses 8K page sizes with 640 B OOB. ECC Strength is reported
online as 1024/40 and I've changed the dts to match as there are a few
floating around online for the A13.

There are 3 ways I've tried to get u-boot with SPL loading from NAND and
none of them have been successful.

1. Use the same fel write script that CHIP uses. With their pre-compiled
uBoot and my dts nand is visible and writable by uBoot for both write and
write.raw. Theirs separate the sunxi-spl and uboot and flashes it to
different locations.
2. Use 2016-01 RC2 compiled with the a13 dts with the added nand entry.
Flash the whole u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin to the beginning of nand. The
size lined up with 8K pages so no padding was needed (or so I assume). For
some reason the write locks up when trying to write something large than
~100K or so...
3. Boot buildroot and use mtd_debug erase & nandwrite to write the
u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin to the beginning of NAND.

I saw this post: http://lists.denx.de/pipermail/u-boot/2015-May/214959.html
about someone trying something similar, but I find it strange none of my
images work.

Adding the chip to the nand_ids.c file, just enabled ONFI, without it
u-Boot claims the ONFI header can't be found, doesn't seem like a big deal.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Kevin