Ways to copy FIT image from the flash to RAM

[Sean Anderson <seanga2@gmail.com>]

On 9/11/20 1:47 PM, Andrii Voloshyn wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
>      What are the ways of copying whole FIT image form NOR flash to RAM by specifying flash offset without any extra bytes. 
> I've seen quite a lot of times when kernel image size has a fixed value (as an uboot environment variable), which is greater than the actual kernel size.
> Problem with that that we copy from flash whatever is after kernel which is not required, and there is a potential problem when kernel gets bigger at some
> point than the fixed size specified in the variable mentioned above.
>      As FIT file has all required info about size, is there a command to copy it to RAM from flash?
> 
> Thank you
> 
> Cheers,
> Andy
> 

Yes... but only for NAND flash...

I am also interested in booting from NOR flash, so I was looking around
and noticed that the function nand_load_image used by the nboot command
contains no nand-specific functionality. Although it calls
nand_read_skip_bad, that in turn only call simple wrappers around
generic mtd functions. The only nan-specific part is the check against
unknown command suffixes, which is easily moved to do_nandboot.

In terms of things already supported by U-Boot, you could format your
flash device with UBIFS, and then use ubifsmount/ubifsload/bootm to
boot.

--Sean