Tom's Electronics Pages

August 13, 2018

U-Boot for the Nanopi Fire3

This board has provided me with a trial by fire learning about U-Boot development. Apparently the U-Boot shipped by Friendly ARM only supports MMC booting. At any even, it does not support network booting and does not even include a network driver. Apparently this is an as yet untrodden path.

But I need, or at least strongly desire a U-boot that supports booting via TFTP. I arrived at this, but it was a long hard path.

Configure U-Boot for network booting (works!)
The path to a network capable U-boot
Lessons about the MMU
Lessons about software tools
The "bl1" boot loader
Friendly Elec - Fire3 bootloader forum

Below here are pages that describe episodes during the journey.

Configure U-Boot for network booting - first attempt (fails)
Rebuild U-Boot from source
U-Boot build log
Who is Nexell (and Designware for that matter) ?
U-Boot internals and network driver
U-Boot -- getting the config to include the designware driver
U-Boot forums and the s5p6818
Driver Model, DM, and CONFIG_DM_ETH
U-Boot flow of execution
U-Boot environment variables and commands
U-Boot messages from a working setup
U-Boot board initialization
Status after a week of work 8-18-2018
Linux and the designware network driver
FIP and booting
Track down that exception
ARM unaligned address handling
ARM D cache enable

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's electronics pages / tom@mmto.org