Mainline kernel bad magic for Pine64-A64-LTS

[Quentin Schulz]

Hi Louis,

On 10/13/24 9:34 PM, Louis Holbrook wrote:
> [You don't often get email from accounts-uboot at holbrook.no. Learn why this is important at https://aka.ms/LearnAboutSenderIdentification ]
> 
> (Also posted in pine64 forum
> https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=19460)
> 
> 
> In an attempt to troubleshoot failing to get generic alpine linux to
> run on PA64-2G-LTS, I've tried to reduce the problem to the smallest
> steps that are legible to me.
> 
> When booting the kernel, I get "Bad ARM64 Image Magic" I can't figure
> out what this means, and why it is happening. Sources I have searched
> seem to be board specific, and found nothing on this board. I've arrived
> at a point where I cannot find a way to reason further about it, so thus
> I am reaching out.
> 
> I am currently loading the kernel and dtb manually at the uboot prompt:
> 
> setenv bootargs loglevel=7 earlyprintk
> fatload mmc 0:1 0x42000000 boot/vmlinux
> fatload mmc 0:1 0x4a000000 boot/u-boot.dtb
> booti 0x42000000 - 0x4a000000
> 

Make sure that those are absolutely NOT overlapping, i.e. you may be 
writing u-boot.dtb over vmlinux and thus corrupting it. I've not made 
the maths if this is reasonable with the addresses provided there but 
it's good general advice anyway. What I usually like to do is have the 
DTB right before the vmlinux, like 1MB before. No way a DTB is going to 
be bigger than that :)

I have never used vmlinux so cannot tell if you're supposed to use booti 
with it. I usually just get the Image or Image.gz from arch/arm64/boot 
and `booti` it and that should just work.

I also do not exactly know if you're supposed to be able to use u-boot's 
DTB for Linux kernel. Eventually we want to go towards this, but I don't 
know if that's necessarily possible today (but that wouldn't have 
anything to do with the bad image).

Cheers,
Quentin