[Arm-netbook] It arrived in the post just now!

[luke.leighton]

On Fri, Aug 2, 2013 at 11:03 AM, Henrik Nordström
<henrik at henriknordstrom.net> wrote:
> fre 2013-08-02 klockan 00:08 -0400 skrev Ryan Mullen:
>
>> However, what exactly would the procedure be for this EOMA68-A20? I
>> assume that I short the UBOOT jumper and power up, which might place
>> me in FEL mode.
>
> Yes.
>
> Or by connecting UART and pressing the right key during boot1 (1 or 2, I
> don't remember, one is FEL, the other usb-storage mode, always mix them
> up)

 2.  you have to catch it within 1 second of power-up, and to have the
Allwinner boot1 on the Nand...

> Or by destroying NAND contents so the normal boot always fails.

 ... which of course you wouldn't have if you did that :)

>>  In this mode I should be able to do something
>> interesting, and the documentation on the sunxi wiki says I should use
>> LiveSuit and a USB cable. Is fel-boot a replacement for LiveSuit? It's
>> a little unclear. How do I get to enter the fel commands on the
>> USBBoot wiki page?

 sunxi-scripts "fex" command, which uses libusb to look for the
0xblah:blah can't remember exactly what it is, but it just does "read,
write, execute" which is exactly what we need.  it's quite basic.

>> Does it give me a ttyUSB or something?

 no.  it's much more basic and completely different from a ttyUSB
device - utterly different type of USB device, utterly different data
- there's absolutely nothing in common.

all it does is accept read commands, accept write commands and accept
a memory address to start executing from.  that's it.  so we use that
to upload a boot0 initialiser, then execute it, then upload u-boot (or
anything else you want), and execute that.

done.  simple.

> It's not yet a "replacement for livesuit", but it does give you a fully
> controlled boot process using USB, including the ability to boot a
> kernel + initrd with USB serial or USB networking if you prefer. I.e.
> much better than livesuit for most of us :)

 i used it to upload the miniroot initrd that henrik created, it was
really handy having even just busybox and dropbear and being able to
do modprobe g_serial and then modprobe g_ether later, i was able to
check that everything was at least functional.


> fel-boot was an earlier name for this thing before support got properly
> integrated into the sunxi u-boot tree. RIP fel-boot.

 :)