kwboot: UART booting with bin_hdr u-boot (Marvell Armada 385)

Tony Dinh mibodhi at gmail.com
Wed Jan 4 02:55:41 CET 2023


Hi Pali,

I'm building a new u-boot for the Thecus N2350 board (Armada 385
dual-core 1Ghz 1GB DDR4). The trouble with this board is DDR4, which
is not currently supported in u-boot (also cc this to Chris for
commenting about Marvell DDR4 training driver).

So I'm building with binary.0 in the ./board/thecus/n2350/. This
binary.0 is a copy of the Marvell bin_hdr for SPI in the GPL source
for this board (provided by Thecus). My
./board/thecus/n2350/kwbimage.cfg.in file looks like this

# Armada 38x uses version 1 image format
VERSION         1
# Boot Media configurations
BOOT_FROM spi
# Binary Header (bin_hdr) with DDR4 training code
BINARY board/thecus/n2350/binary.0 0000005b 00000068

When I kwboot the u-boot.kwb image (using kwboot binary built with
2023.01-rc4), the header was transferred successfully, but then the
BootROM jumped to SPI u-boot, instead of loading the u-boot payload
from UART. Please see the log below.
<BEGIN LOG>
# ./kwboot -t -p -B 115200 /dev/ttyUSB0 -b uboot.kwb

kwboot version 2023.01-tld-1-00048-g19e15f9081-dirty
Patching image boot signature to UART
Aligning image header to Xmodem block size
Sending boot message. Please reboot the target.../
Sending boot image header (97792 bytes)...
  0 % [......................................................................]
  9 % [......................................................................]
<snip>
 82 % [......................................................................]
 91 % [................................................................      ]
Done

BootROM - 1.73
Booting from SPI flash

<snip>
U-Boot 2013.01 (Nov 12 2018 - 20:56:19) Marvell version: 2015_T1.0p18-tld-4
<END LOG>

It seems kwboot patched the image, but the BOOT_FROM indicator was
still recognized as from SPI. So the BootROM loaded the stock u-boot
image from SPI and executed it. Since I am booting with bin_hdr, I'm
not sure if there is something inside this blob that has forced this
indicator to SPI.

I'm attaching the u-boot.kwb image to this email, in case you are
interested in taking a look at the structure.

Thanks,
Tony
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