[Arm-netbook] Flashing the NAND

[Siarhei Siamashka]

On Tue, 10 Dec 2013 22:49:50 +0100
Marco Martin <notmart at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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?)

Well, earlier in this thread somebody has already mentioned
    http://linux-sunxi.org/Installing_to_NAND_from_SD_card
I guess, making it better is always welcome. You can also ask people
on #linux-sunxi irc channel.

> 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.

Thanks for providing updates on your progress.

-- 
Best regards,
Siarhei Siamashka