[U-Boot] i.mx6 board booting

[U-Boot] i.mx6 board booting

[JYOTI DUBEY]

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

SO what can be the problem behind it and how can we overcome it?

[U-Boot] i.mx6 board booting

[Eric Nelson]

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.