Tom's computer pages

July 2, 2024

Antminer S9 board - running Bootgen

I have built both the fsbl and uboot from source. The game now is to pack them up into a BOOT.BIN image, put them onto an SD card, and see what happens.
I used this for "boot.bif"

all :
{
        [bootloader]fsbl.elf
        u-boot.elf
}

Then ran this command:

bootgen -arch zynq -image boot.bif -o boot.bin

I put it onto an SD card and it does not work. I am having some stupid problem with picocom and my USB to serial adapter -- it exists picocom every time I cycle power, so I miss vital output right as the board comes out of reset.

This may be a picocom bug. I installed screen, tio, and minicom and will now give them all a try. Screen does the same thing.

screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200
tio -b 115200 /dev/ttyUSB0

tio is nicest. It gives me the following. I get a Disconnected message, but it sticks around and gives me the Connected message.

[18:13:43.773] tio v3.4
[18:13:43.773] Press ctrl-t q to quit
[18:13:43.777] Connected to /dev/ttyUSB0
-- some junk here
[18:13:52.834] Disconnected
[18:13:53.839] Connected to /dev/ttyUSB0

So, we are getting no console messages from the FSBL, which is our first concern. Whether or not U-boot has been loaded is anyones guess. We also wonder (prematurely) about the dtb that U-boot will be looking for.

Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Computer Info / tom@mmto.org