BeagleBoard C5 Building u-boot

1
votes

I am trying to successfully build u-boot for my BeagleBoard C5 board. I am using Ubuntu 10.04 and the Crosstool-NG toolchain. I have working images for Xloader (MLO), u-boot.bin, and uImage that I found prebuilt from the AngstromBB project for which the boards boots Angstrom successfully.

I can successfully build the u-boot.bin file by doing the following:

git clone git://git.denx.de/u-boot.git u-boot/
make ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-none-linux-gnueabi- omap3_beagle_config
make ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-none-linux-gnueabi-

I then copy my just built u-boot.bin to replace the working version of u-boot.bin on the SD card and attempt to boot the board but it fails by hanging at:

Reading boot sector
Loading u-boot.bin from mmc

It will just sit there forever! I cannot seem to find any clear instructions on building u-boot for the C5 BeagleBoard other than that it is different then previous versions or requiring something called 'SPL' built with u-boot. Does anybody know how I might succeed in building my own u-boot.bin image for the BeagleBoard C5?

1
embedded-linuxbeagleboardtoolchainu-boot

1 Answers

2
votes

Your first step should be researching the boot sequence of the board. Some processors do not boot directly to u-boot. They launch an application that is stored in Flash or maybe an EEPROM on the board. In the case of your C5, this application is X-Loader (https://gitorious.org/x-loader). You are going to need to understand what this level 1 boot loader does and how exactly it launches u-boot. Generally they will do some basic PSC, DRAM, ... configuration before launching the full boot loader. But where does it look for u-boot? Does X-Loader copy u-boot to RAM and begin execution from there? Or does it it start execution from your MMC? Sometimes there are jumpers that can be set which will control the boot sequence. So X-Loader could boot from NAND, NOR or SD/MMC depending on the setting.

Where did you get your u-boot source code from? Did you download it directly from the denx website or was it provided with your Beagle board?

In general, it is very difficult to debug bringing up a board (even if it's a reference board) without tools. Was a debugger provided with the board or d you have a JTAG debugger of your own that you could use to set hardware breakpoints and step through the code?