How to prepare SD card for imx6qp and bootimage

[mrigendra_chaub]

I am porting to a board that is based on i.MX6QP. 

Previous board is using NAND flash to boot and is based on plugin image.

Now i am trying to port android on this board with newest nxp kernel and uboot.

The thing is I can't generate  uboot.imx file as it did not have imx cfg file. So until now I am creating a uboot.img and stripping off the first 64 byte to get correct offsets and do dd command to raw write on the /dev/sdX.

Now I need to port kernel.

Previously the board was using kernel stored at 0x50000 offset at NAND and also environment variables from NAND.

I want it to be pure SD based boot so I want to store all environment variables on SD as well as kernel.

1. Can anybody guide me what changes are required to be done. I disabled NAND related macros from board file and wrote mmc related macros.

#define CONFIG_FSL_ENV_IN_MMC
#define CONFIG_IMG_SIZE (512 * 1024) //u-boot size
#define CONFIG_CMD_MMC
#define CONFIG_CMD_FAT 1
#define CONFIG_MMC_BASE 0x0

#define CONFIG_ENV_SECT_SIZE (8 * 1024)
#define CONFIG_ENV_SIZE CONFIG_ENV_SECT_SIZE

#elif defined(CONFIG_FSL_ENV_IN_MMC)

#define CONFIG_ENV_IS_IN_MMC 1
#define CONFIG_ENV_OFFSET (CONFIG_IMG_SIZE - CONFIG_ENV_SIZE)

When I build u-boot with these settings I don't see enironment variables at CONFIG_ENV_OFFSET that is here 504kb.How ever I can see the envionment at some other place in hexdump.Also the size of uboot.img is reduceed to some ~400kb.

So where my understanding is wrong?

2. How to prepare the card?

I prepared card and making two partitons, 1 primary partition of FAT 25 GB and other EXT as 90 GB, and copied uboot.img inside but I can't boot with this.

3.At what addess I can store kernel in sdcard and at what address uboot can relocate it. I think Previous uboot was relocating it to 0x11000000.

I am a total noob here and need some direction atleast.\

Nowhere till now I used yocto and I don't want to use it.

Thanks.

[igorpadykov]

Hi  mrigendra

seems most simple way to look at Android documentation provided on

i.MX Software|NXP 

for example check sect.5 Programming Images attached Android User Guide.

For preparing partitions one can try fsl-sdcard-partition.sh included in

i.MX 6/7D Series Manufacturing Toolkit for Android O8.0.0_1.0.0 Release

https://www.nxp.com/webapp/Download?colCode=IMX_O8.0.0_1.0.0_TOOL&appType=license&location=null&Pare... 

For programming images may be useful to use mfg tools, included in this package and script

mfgtool2-android-mx6qp-sabresd-sd.vbs

Best regards
igor
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[mrigendra_chaub]

Can you tell me what environment variables I need to put inside board header file so that my board boots up.

The thing I don't understand is this,

I can't generate uboot.imx because I am using a plugin image and using flash_header.S

How can I generate .imx file, because as per the makefile I need to have the path for imx configuration file and that I don't have?

I am able to create a uboot.img file. Now I follow these command from linux user guide,
sudo dd if=<U-Boot image> of=/dev/sdx bs=1k seek=<offset> conv=fsync

here offset is 1 in my case.

This uboot does not boot. If I do this

sudo dd if=<U-Boot image> of=/dev/sdx bs=1M count=1

My uboot comes up.

So why ROM code is not able to boot up properly with given commands?