[PATCH 0/5] collected fallout of porting an ATSAMA5D27 based board

[Benedikt Spranger]

Am Mon, 21 Oct 2024 08:03:35 +0200
schrieb Alexander Dahl <ada at thorsis.com>:

> Hello Benedikt,
> 
> Am Fri, Oct 18, 2024 at 04:19:08PM +0200 schrieb Benedikt Spranger:
> > On Fri, 18 Oct 2024 15:11:20 +0200
> > Alexander Dahl <ada at thorsis.com> wrote:
> > 
> > Hello Alexander,
> > 
> > > Am Fri, Oct 18, 2024 at 10:30:00AM +0200 schrieb Benedikt
> > > Spranger:
> > > > OK, you might say the nand_atmel NAND driver is obsolete, but it
> > > > was the only solution to get booting from NAND running. The new
> > > > DM based NAND driver refused to do anything usefull, so I
> > > > dropped it after spending a couple of days debugging it:
> > > 
> > > Strange.  I have at least three different boards with SAMA5D27
> > > successfully booting from NAND flash with the new DM based driver
> > > (unfortunately none of them upstreamed, which also won't change
> > > in the foreseeable future, sorry).
> > OK.
> >  
> > > Do you use at91bootstrap as 2nd level bootloader like me or
> > > something else?
> > I use the U-Boot SPL. There is no UBI support in at91boostrap. There
> > were some attemps, but...
> > No interest at the at91bootstrap side.
> 
> Yeah, been there.  Wanted at91bootstrap to boot from SPI-NOR which is
> _not_ Quad-SPI, and the feature request was closed with "if you wanna
> do it by yourself, ask our support for help". :-/
> 
> > > For me it was basically getting the dts for U-Boot correct, but
> > > I got that running with all U-Boot releases since 2023.04 up to
> > > 2024.10.  Could you share some more detail?
> > I face all the trouble in SPL. And since the SPL is the essential
> > part here (UBI support) I gave up at one point. I simply couldn't
> > any usefull read data from the NAND flash, but all 0.
> 
> You can not store bootstrap or SPL in UBI, it must sit in first sector
> of raw NAND, I suppose that's how you load SPL?
Sorry for not beeing that clear.
The SPL sits in the first Page in NAND flash. It does it's magic and
then load the U-Boot payload from an UBI volume (Or directly load a
kernel). Then it "starts" the payload.

> Did you try reading/writing raw NAND from there?
I try to read from SPL. That's all what ubispl wants. No need for write
support here.

> I'm not familiar with SPL, does it consider dts?
It consider dts.

> I could share my dts parts if that helps you.
That would be great. I definitly give it a try.
So here is a quick extract (EBI is also used otherwise) of what I did.
Hopefully I did not forget anything...

--- a/arch/arm/dts/at91-sama5d27_ABC.dts
+++ b/arch/arm/dts/at91-sama5d27_ABC.dts
@@ -63,7 +63,62 @@
                                        bias-disable;
                                        bootph-all;
                                };
+
+                               pinctrl_nand0_default: nand0_default {
+                                       pinmux =
+                                       <PIN_PA0__D0>,
+                                        <PIN_PA1__D1>,
+                                        <PIN_PA2__D2>,
+                                        <PIN_PA3__D3>,
+                                        <PIN_PA4__D4>,
+                                        <PIN_PA5__D5>,
+                                        <PIN_PA6__D6>,
+                                        <PIN_PA7__D7>,
+                                       <PIN_PA8__NWE_NANDWE>,
+                                        <PIN_PA9__NCS3>,
+                                        <PIN_PA10__A21_NANDALE>,
+                                        <PIN_PA11__A22_NANDCLE>,
+                                        <PIN_PA12__NRD_NANDOE>,
+                                        <PIN_PA21__NANDRDY>;
+                                       bias-disable;
+                               };
                        };
                };
        };
 };
+
+&ebi {
+       pinctrl-names = "default";
+       pinctrl-0 = <&pinctrl_nand0_default>;
+       status = "okay";
+
+       nand_controller: nand-controller {
+               status = "okay";
+
+               nand at 3 {
+                       reg = <0x3 0x0 0x800000>;
+                       //atmel,rb = <0>;
+                       nand-bus-width = <8>;
+                       nand-ecc-mode = "hw";
+                       nand-ecc-strength = <4>;
+                       nand-ecc-step-size = <512>;
+                       nand-on-flash-bbt;
+
+                       partitions {
+                               compatible = "fixed-partitions";
+                               #address-cells = <1>;
+                               #size-cells = <1>;
+
+                               spl at 0 {
+                                       label = "spl";
+                                       reg = <0x0 0x40000>;
+                               };
+
+                               ubi at 40000 {
+                                       label = "UBI";
+                                       reg = <0x40000 0x0>;
+                               };
+                       };
+                };
+        };
+};
 
> (What I do here: SoC loads at91bootstrap from raw NAND at offset 0,
> at91bootstrap loads U-Boot from raw NAND at some offset like 0x20000,
> U-Boot (proper) loads everything else from UBI.)
From my experience that can cause significant headache starting after
5-6 years in use. That's what I try to avoid :)

Regards
    Benedikt Spranger