Update: uMon is now booting from SD

[Ed Sutter]

On 7/4/2015 11:23 AM, Jarielle Catbagan wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 4, 2015 at 6:50 AM, Ed Sutter <edsutterjr at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 7/3/2015 8:49 PM, Jarielle Catbagan wrote:
>>> Hi Ed,
>>>
>>> On Fri, Jul 3, 2015 at 6:03 AM, Ed Sutter <edsutterjr at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> On 7/2/2015 9:27 PM, Jarielle Catbagan wrote:
>>>>> Hello Ed and all:
>>>>>
>>>>> uMon is now booting from SD!
>>>>>
>>>>> As Ed has indicated to me, the first reason why uMon did not appear to
>>>>> boot from SD was that UART initialization was not performed when the
>>>>> AM335x was booting from memory.  Originally, when uMon was booting
>>>>> from UART, as Ed has mentioned to me, uMon was working and was able to
>>>>> use the UART because it appears that the UART was set up already by
>>>>> the internal ROM code during the UART boot procedure.
>>>>>
>>>>> The UART initialization was suppose to be done in cpuio.c.  Ed has
>>>>> sent me a diff containing the necessary modifications/additions that
>>>>> has served as the basis for the UART initialization.  After applying
>>>>> this diff to the current uMon tree, building the uMon image and
>>>>> transferring the image to an SD card, attempting to boot from SD still
>>>>> resulted in the BBB to appear to not boot up.
>>>>>
>>>>> Ed has mentioned to me that one of the possible reasons why the SD
>>>>> boot is not coming through could be something that is missing during
>>>>> the UART initialization like clock management or power control.  This
>>>>> has prompted me to go back and look through the AM335x TRM,
>>>>> specifically on the sections regarding the PRCM (Power Reset Clock
>>>>> Management) and UART modules.
>>>>>
>>>>> It turned out that one of the UART0 registers, register MDR1, the
>>>>> MODESELECT field had the value 0x07 which translates to the UART
>>>>> module being disabled. Since the UART in uMon is already set up to
>>>>> work with UART 16x mode, and the value for this mode is 0x00, this was
>>>>> stored in the MODESELECT field of the MDR1 register.
>>>>>
>>>>> After setting this field the uMon image was rebuilt, the GP header was
>>>>> prepended to the image and was transferred to the SD card as "MLO".
>>>>> Booting the SD card resulted in uMon being able to boot and to reach
>>>>> the uMon command line.
>>>>>
>>>>> My next steps before proceeding to finish DDR initialization is to
>>>>> clean up the updated files that perform the necessary UART
>>>>> initialization and then I will submit the patches that reflect these
>>>>> changes for review.
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> umon-devel mailing list
>>>>> umon-devel at rtems.org
>>>>> http://lists.rtems.org/mailman/listinfo/umon-devel
>>>>>
>>>> Congratulations!  Big step IMHO...
>>> Thank you!
>>>
>>>> This will allow you to experiment a bit more without the need to reboot
>>>> manually each time.
>>>> Looking forward to the patches!  I assume you used a FAT formatted SD
>>>> card
>>>> to do this?
>>> Yes, I booted the uMon image from a FAT32 formatted SD card.
>>>
>>>> Make sure you put everything in the port directory needed to reproduce
>>>> this.
>>>> When you submit the patches I'll push them and then whatever work I did
>>>> that
>>>> does not
>>>> overlap with your patches I'll push up as well.
>>>> Great stuff!!!  And excellent reporting!!!
>>>> Ed
>>> I just finished the patches and I sent them already to umon-devel for
>>> your review.  Please let me know if there are any inconsistencies with
>>> the patches and I'll be glad to make the necessary changes in order
>>> for the patches to meet the specification that you are looking for.
>>>
>>> Thanks!
>>>
>>> Best Regards,
>>> Jarielle
>>>
>>> P.S. Have a great Independence Day weekend! :-)
>>>
>> Jarielle,
>> I didn't look at the patches yet, but I'm sure there won't be any
>> inconsistencies.  The only
>> point I was making with reference to me pushing some stuff in as well was to
>> make sure
>> that we have everything that's been done put into the port for use by folks
>> in the future.
> I agree.
>
>> For example, I just happened to take the "raw" mode approach, so I want to
>> make sure
>> that is in the port, plus I did that LED/GPIO stuff so while its very
>> trivial, its still more to
>> go into the port for general use.
>> Thanks for the patches!
>> Ed
> That's great to hear! Yeah, being able to boot using "raw" mode is a
> nice option to have.  Integrating the LED/GPIO into the port would be
> nice as well.  I think it would be cool to blink some LEDs for status
> indication when uMon is running.  What do you think?
>
>>
Jarielle,
Ok I pulled in the patches and things built clean.  I see an MLO file that is the concatenation of
gp_header.bin and boot.bin.  Unless I missed something, there are no instructions for the final
step of creating the SD card.  For the raw mode, its just a 'dd'; but I suppose there's more to it
for FAT correct?
Can you add some instructions for this?  Assume the card is not pre-formatted as FAT.  Start
from scratch.  Then I'll follow those steps to install the card on my board to verify.
Tx