[Arm-netbook] next step is a boot image

[Andreas Grapentin]

> On 17. Jan 2023, at 11:10, Pablo Rath <pablo at parobalth.org> wrote:
> 
> Ok. You are aware of that wiki page, are you?:
> https://rhombus-tech.net/allwinner_a10/Buildroot_Toolchain/
> 
> Once you have the toolchain running and a copy of legacy sunxi u-boot
> make sure to checkout this tag:
> git checkout v2013.07-sunxi.4
> 
> make sure to change the boards.cfg (MMC_SUNXI_SLOT=2), and write sunxi U-Boot to SD-Card with the commands described after v2013.07 or earlier. This were the steps I had to take to boot a sunxi 3.4 kernel and a Debian rootfs in 2020.
> I have documented this here:
> https://rhombus-tech.net/allwinner/a20/EOMA68-A20_2-7-4_preproduction/
> (Section Sunxi U-Boot (legacy))
> 
> If it helps, i could upload a copy of sunxi-spl.bin and u-boot.bin for
> you. 

Thank you for those instructions, they were immensely helpful. I compiled u-boot from the v2013.07-sunxi.4 tag, made the changes to the boards.cfg you suggested, and deployed to SDcard, and the behaviour has changed. The system now boot loops, repeating this output:

U-Boot SPL 2013.07-07841-g569c37da7d-dirty (Jan 17 2023 - 19:37:10)
Board: EOMA68_A20
DRAM: 1024 MiB
CPU: 960000000Hz, AXI/AHB/APB: 3/2/2
SUNXI SD/MMC: 0

for reference, this was the previous output:

> U-Boot SPL 2017.01-2 (Jan 18 2017 - 21:30:38)
> DRAM: 2048 MiB
> CPU: 912000000Hz, AXI/AHB/APB: 3/2/2
> Trying to boot from MMC2MMC Device 1 not found
> spl: could not find mmc device. error: -19
> SPL: failed to boot from all boot devices
> ### ERROR ### Please RESET the board ###

first thing I notice is that the reported CPU frequency and available RAM is different. I wish that u-boot would present me with a command line instead of resetting, but I haven’t figured out how to do that yet.

-A