Re: IPFire on Utilite

[Igor Grinberg <grinberg@compulab.co.il>]

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Hi Michael,

On 11/13/13 14:04, Igor Vaisbein wrote:
> Hello Michael,
> 
> I am glad to hear that you are making progress with support for i.MX6
> devices. We already have done some work for multi-platform kernel
> support so I do believe that most things are already in place.
> 
> I am copying Igor Grinberg, our Linux team leader. He will support
> you with the necessary U-boot materials and documentation.
> 
> Looking forward to further developments.
> 
> Best Regards, Igor.
> 
> -----Original Message----- From: Michael Tremer
> [mailto:michael.tremer(a)ipfire.org] Sent: Wednesday, November 13, 2013
> 12:59 AM To: Igor Vaisbein Cc: sig-arm(a)lists.ipfire.org Subject:
> IPFire on Utilite
> 
> Hello Igor,
> 
> although this email is directed to you, I am CC'ing our Special
> Interest Group ARM mailing list for archiving purposes.
> 
> As you know, we are currently working on rebasing IPFire on Linux
> 3.10 and we are introducing a multiplatform kernel which is supposed
> to run on a lot of ARM boards including Utilite.

This is good to hear!
There is a patchm adding basic support for Utilite,
pending merge in the next merge window:

http://git.linaro.org/gitweb?p=people/shawnguo/linux-2.6.git;a=commit;h=95f7e8a387c84c3b4e07e1579daefbb61bc1096b

> 
> We made progress and solved some very hard to solve
> grsecurity-related issues in association with Brad, so that we
> currently have a kernel which boots on a Wandboard Quad - also based
> on the same Freescale SoC you are using. Some patches for supporting
> Utilite are already included, so that I have very high hopes, that
> this kernel will already boot on that hardware as well.

That would be great!

> 
> The Utilite I have got, unfortunately comes with an old version of
> u-boot, which does not support the bootz command that is required to
> easily boot a multiplatform kernel. Could you please provide the
> sources so that we can build a version of u-boot with our
> requirements? It would also be great if this is a more recent one
> (don't know if there is development going on behind closed doors).

Our U-Boot for Utilite (cm-fx6) has the bootz command supported
starting from version v2009.08-cm-fx6-0.90. The binary is attached.
Here is the update procedure for SPI flash:

1) Get the new binary into the RAM:
  TFTP commands: tftp 10800000 cm-fx6-u-boot
  MMC  commands: mmc dev 2 && mmc rescan && fatload mmc 2 10800000 cm-fx6-u-boot

2) Do not power off Utilite during the next step! Erase and program U-Boot into
   the SPI flash:
  sf probe 0:0 && sf erase 0 40000 && sf write 10800000 0 40000

3) Once the above operation has finished, reset the Utilite and the new U-Boot 
   will boot.

I've uploaded the U-Boot sources to the Utilite gitorious project:
https://gitorious.org/utilite

Have a nice hacking!

> 
> I also think I remember that Utilite will run the bootloader it can
> find on the micro SD card, if I don't confuse this with an other
> device. So that if I want to replace/test my own version of u-boot I
> don't need to flash the internal one. I cannot find the documentation
> about this matter any more and I would like to know where the u-boot
> image needs to be placed in order to be executed.

Well, the following dd command can be used for placing the U-Boot binary
onto an SD card:

  dd if=$UBOOTSRCFILE of=$SDCARDDEVFILE bs=1K seek=1 skip=1


-- 
Regards,
Igor.

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