[U-Boot] i.mx6 board booting

[Eric Nelson <eric.nelson@boundarydevices.com>]

Hello Jyoti,

I think you're confused about the use of un-partitioned space
for booting (which is common on many other boards) and the use
of the filesystem as a path to SPI-NOR used by our boards.

On 02/05/2014 11:59 PM, JYOTI DUBEY wrote:
> I followed the following commands to achieve a successful booting of i.mx6
> board using SD card
> dd if=u-boot.imx of=/dev/sdb bs=1k seek=1

In English, this copies u-boot.imx to offset 0x400 of the SD card,
over-writing whatever might be there.

This is a block-level operation, and your card partitioning must
ensure that this is un-formatted space.

> The above command burnt the u-boot.imx image on the SD card though nothing
> was seen on SD card.

That's because you're not using the right glasses...
You'll need to use dd to read things back:

	~/$ sudo dd bs=1k skip=1 count=1 if=/dev/sdb | hexdump

And for comparison:
	~/$ sudo dd if=u-boot.imx bs=1k count=1 | hexdump

> Next the gtkterm configurations were set and after the board was started
> serial console output was interrupted(by pressing a key).
 >
> U-Boot>> sf probe (to probe the flash memory)
> U-Boot>> sf erase 0 0x80000 (to erase the flash)
 >
> U-Boot>>fatload mmc 1 12000000 u-boot.imx
> The above command throws an error -"Unable to read file u-boot.imx"
>
You haven't written the "file" u-boot.imx, you wrote the content
of u-boot.imx to un-named blocks on the SD card.

> SO what can be the problem behind it and how can we overcome it?
>
A. Partition your SD card with one partition
B. Format the partition as FAT32, ext2/3/4
C. Use "cp" to copy u-boot.imx to the filesystem
D. Use fatload or ext2load to load the file, or
    better yet, copy 6x_upgrade to the SD card and
    use the 'upgradeu' command:
	U-Boot > run upgradeu

See the README and 6x_upgrade.txt files in board/boundary/nitrogen6x
for details.