Hi all,
First, disclaimer: this is the first time I'm doing something with U-Boot or the part (ast2500), so any claim I make below can be false or just plain nonsense.
I'm working on expanding support of Aspeed ast2500 part in U-Boot.
I ran into some problems, when I tried to use Linux Kernel device tree for this part in U-Boot. Looking at diagnostic messages ( http://pastebin.ca/3713876) I figured out that the problem is that U-Boot continues to use malloc_simple, even after it has been relocated to RAM. As a result, it fails to allocate 130k needed for environment, because it is larger than the configured size of a memory chunk for simple malloc.
I suspect that this has something to do with memory configuration, do you know what I may be missing? Also, it looks like lowlevel_init has been called twice, i.e. again after relocation -- is this expected? This might be what is causing the problem, because lowlevel_init does a lot of RAM related configuration, but I don't know what to do about it.
There is some very basic support for this part in U-Boot, provided by manufacturer, but it is basically a single platform.S assembly file that does everything, like RAM configuration and some other peripherals support in lowlevel_init procedure.
So, if I want to add proper support for this part, i.e. with device tree and all, is there a way to make this a gradual process? I mean, is it possible to leave existing RAM initialization procedure in lowlevel_init and just add new drivers for something I'm interested in or is this all or nothing kind of thing?
Thank you.