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u-boot for Allwinner A10

Branch information:

sun4i Default branch. Most up to date. Supports booting from MMC only.

lichee/ Unmodified mirrors of original Allwinner sources

wip/ Work in progress temporary feature branches

wip/update Attempt to update to current u-boot version. It's known that SPL is not working well but you main u-boot binary should be fine. You can combine with an SPL built from the sun4i branch.

Tags/Releases

v2011.09-sun4i

How to compile u-boot

You need a suitable gcc ARM Linux GNUEABI toolchain installed and added to your PATH.

Then compile u-boot by running

make sun4i CROSS_COMPILE=arm-none-linux-gnueabi-

or alternatively depending on how your toolchain is configured

make sun4i CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabi-

How to make a bootable sunxi SD-card

A10 boots the SPL loader from block 8. This then loads actual u-boot from block 32 onwards, counted in 1KB blocks.

dd if=spl/sun4i-spl.bin of=/dev/sdc bs=1024 seek=8
dd if=u-boot.bin of=/dev/sdc bs=1024 seek=32

You also need to partition the card to store system.bin, uImage, boot.scr (optional) and rootfs partition there. First partition should start at sector 2048 to leave sufficient space for uboot & environment.

This version of u-boot supports boot.scr, and will look for it in the first partition FAT /boot.scr or extX /boot.scr or extX /boot/boot.scr. boot.scr contains your needed uboot commands for loading script.bin, kernel. initrd (optional), setting kernel parameters and bootig.

To create boot.scr first make a u-boot script boot.cmd with the u-boot commands you need for booting your system. An example follows:

setenv bootargs console=ttyS0 root=/dev/mmcblk0p1 rootwait panic=10 ${extra}
ext2load mmc 0 0x43000000 boot/script.bin
ext2load mmc 0 0x48000000 boot/uImage
bootm 0x48000000

Then translate this to a boot.scr by using the mkimage command

mkimage -C none -A arm -T script -d boot.cmd boot.scr

If no boot.scr is found then it will fall back to load script.bin & kernel uImage from the first partition in FAT format

fatload mmc 0 0x43000000 script.bin; fatload mmc 0 0x48000000 ${kernel}; bootm 0x48000000

Default environment

baudrate=115200                                                                       
boot.scr=if fatload mmc 0 0x44000000 boot.scr || ext2load mmc 0 0x44000000 boot.scr || ext2load mmc 0 0x44000000 boot/boot.scr; then source 0x44000000; fi; true
boot_mmc=fatload mmc 0 0x43000000 script.bin; fatload mmc 0 0x48000000 ${kernel}; bootm 0x48000000
bootcmd=run boot.scr setargs boot_mmc                                                         
bootdelay=3                                                                           
console=ttyS0,115200                                                                  
kernel=uImage                                                                         
loglevel=8                                                                            
panicarg=panic=10                                                                     
root=/dev/mmcblk0p2
setargs=setenv bootargs console=${console} root=${root} loglevel=${loglevel} ${panicarg} ${extraargs}
stderr=serial                                                                         
stdin=serial                                                                          
stdout=serial 

Storage map

How the SD-Card is used by u-boot-mmc, counted in 1KB blocks:

start size
  0   8KB Unused, available for partition table etc.
  8  24KB Initial SPL loader
 32 512KB u-boot
544 128KB environment