U-boot-NOR built with poky + meta-fsl-ppc doesn't work on p1010rdb

[fahadusman]

Hello,

I am trying to build u-boot using the u-boot recipe from meta-fsl-ppc layer with vanilla poky metadata. It works fine when we flash the corresponding binary to NAND flash, but the NOR version of u-boot doesn't work on either of the NOR memory banks. The behaviour is the same with p1010rdb-pa and p1010rdb-pb boards. I am following the steps from README file in u-boot sources directory. The board appears to be stuck and nothing is printed on the serial terminal.

However if I use the u-boot-NOR binaries built with FSL QorIQ SDK 1.6, they work just fine.

Thanks,
Fahad Usman.

[yipingwang]

Hello Fahad Usman,

Where did your get u-boot source tar ball?

Why not install SDK 1.6 Source and Cache binary ISOs to perform the build?

Have a great day,
Yiping

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[fahadusman]

Hello Yiping,

We are building u-boot using the upstream meta-fsl-ppc layer (meta-fsl-ppc - Layer containing Freescale PPC hardware support metadata) and the u-boot recipe uses the following git revision;

SRC_URI = "git://git.freescale.com/ppc/sdk/u-boot.git;nobranch=1"

SRCREV = "fe1d4f5739e752ad45ada6227a9fb19590af7194"

At Mentor Graphics we use the public meta-fsl-ppc layer to support PowerPC targets. The u-boot built with FSL SDK 1.6 works fine but we want the u-boot built with upstream sources to work as well. It works fine with NAND and SPI but doesn't work for NOR.

To reproduce the problem, you can perform the following steps;

1. clone poky and meta-fsl-ppc layes,
2. execute "source poky/oe-init-build-env" to create a build directory,
3. set MACHINE = "p1010rdb" in local.conf and add meta-fsl-ppc layer to bblayers.conf
4. execute "bitbake u-boot"
5. flash the resulting u-boot-NOR binary using instructions from build/tmp/work/p1010rdb-poky-linux-gnuspe/u-boot-qoriq/2014.01+fslgit-r0/git/board/freescale/p1010rdb/README.P1010RDB-PB

Please let me know if you need any further information.

Thanks

Fahad Usman.

[adeel]

Freescale's SDK is also using meta-fsl-ppc-private layer which is provided only with SDK. You need to find relevant patches and put them in your custom recipe. You can also  use hardware debugger to debug u-boot.bin running in NOR flash.

-Adeel

[fahadusman]

Hi Adeel,

We are using QorIQ-SDK 1.6 as a reference and it doesn't have a meta-fsl-ppc-private layer or any other layer with extra u-boot patches. Anyway, I will use a hardware debugger and see if that helps.

Thanks,

Fahad

[yipingwang]

Hello Fahad Usman,

The whole layer meta-fsl-ppc should be pushed to upstream.

Please diff meta-fsl-ppc/recipes-bsp/u-boot/u-boot_git.bb and meta-fsl-ppc/conf/machine/p1010rdb.conf files between the upstream and SDK 1.6.

Actually the only difference between the upstream and SDK 1.6 should only be Toolchain.

Thanks,

Yiping

[fahadusman]

Hello Yiping,

There is no practical difference between the two u-boot recipes and the machine configuration files. Apparently the only difference is of toolchain. Our assumption is that the u-boot built from the upstream meta-fsl-ppc layer should be usable when built with upstream poky/meta-oe.

Can you point to specific toolchain related changes required to make it working without using the complete SDK environment.

Thanks,
Fahad.