[Arm-netbook] Flashing the NAND

[Marco Martin]

On Friday 06 December 2013, luke.leighton wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 6, 2013 at 11:45 AM, Marco Martin <notmart at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I also found this on the wiki
> > http://linux-sunxi.org/Installing_to_NAND_from_SD_card
> 
>  yep that looks good.
> 
> > does seem still reliable? (seems a bit old in this case "sun4i should be
> > replaced with sun7i?)
> > that tutorial i suppose maintains boot0 and boot1 from the default
> > android image
> 
>  that would appear to be the case.  so as long as you don't overwrite
> the boot partition (or you take a dd if backup of it before-hand)
> you're good to go.
> 
>  so those instructions would cover the latter steps of the strategy i
> outlined earlier.

soo,
A small update on this, first things first,
I have got the nand partitioned, a mer system copied on it (pretty much from 
the image i posted the other day)
aaaand... (suspense)

...it works :D

other good news, is that heavy stuff like a full KDE Plasma session starts up 
waaaay faster than from the sd, so a full desktop session looks definitely 
usable, not super fast (as one can imagine) but usable :)

is still very hacky and I found quite some undocumented oddities (that yes, i 
will document).
a quick list, so I don't forget is:

* the stock boot1 version on eoma expect a partition without a filesystem but 
just an initrd dd-ed on top of it, starting with "ANDROID!" (that's on 
/dev/nandc in the default layout, a different partitioning makes boot1 
suicide, if i manage to get correctly boot1 rebuilt, removing it should be an 
easy patch)

* for u-boot i'm using the origin/lichee-dev branch. Unfortunately seems quite 
different from the sunxi branch, probably branched out quite a lot of time 
ago.
It works but i had to modify a lot the default boot params in sun7i.h (what 
would be rocking i think is making it try to boot from sd and if fails then 
boot from nand, I wonder if is possible but this is for another day)

* boot0/boot1: i used the stock ones at first, 
https://github.com/hno/allwinner-boot seems to work, but *not* the last 
revision.
While the older d29c34b revision seems to work (unfortunately many files don't 
seem to have gpl headers, is an issue that should be fixed)
Newer revisions are very different and produce a boot.axf that doesn't start 
(on serial console complains about wrong elf magic or something like that)
It has to be patched a bit to just even build.


That's enough for now...
I think the sanest thing is now document all the steps: so where do you guys 
prefer it to be done?(linux-sunxi wiki? somewhere else?)

Then the first thing that i want to release is an image of the nand correctly 
partitioned with just boot stuff and the kernel in, so that can be used as the 
base to put any rootfs of any distribution on, and for people to experiment 
with

Then I'll publish iterations of what we want shipped on the Improv in the end, 
so as i go, who here has an eoma can test it very easily with just a simple 
dd.

Cheers,
Marco Martin