The CHIP Pro is a SoM made by NextThing Co, and that embeds a GR8 SIP, an AXP209 PMIC, a WiFi BT chip and a 512MB SLC NAND.
Since the first Allwinner device coming whit an SLC NAND that doesn't have the shortcomings (and breakages) the MLC NAND has, we can finally enable the NAND support on a board by default.
This is the occasion to introduce a bunch of additions needed imo to be able to come up with a sane NAND support for our users.
The biggest pain point is that the BROM uses a different ECC and randomizer configuration than for the rest of the NAND. In order to lessen the number of bitflips, you also need to pad with random data the SPL image.
Since it's quite tedious to do right (and most users won't be able to figure it out) and since if it is not done right, it will eventually turn into an unusable system (which is bad UX), we think that the best solution is to generate an SPL image that already embeds all this. We'll possible have to do the same thing for the U-Boot image (at least for the random padding) on MLC NANDs.
The only drawback from that is that you need to flash it raw, instead of using the usual nand write, but it's just a different command, nothing major anyway.
In order to flash it, from a device switched in FEL, on your host: sunxi-fel spl spl/sunxi-spl.bin sunxi-fel write 0x4a000000 u-boot-dtb.bin sunxi-fel write 0x43000000 spl/sunxi-spl-with-ecc.bin sunxi-fel exe 0x4a000000
And on the board, once u-boot is running (assuming the NAND is already erased):
nand write.raw.noverify 0x43000000 0 40 nand write.raw.noverify 0x43000000 0x400000 40
nand write 0x4a000000 0x800000 0xc0000
I also encountered some weird bug in the private libgcc that prevents U-Boot from loading. Disabling CONFIG_USE_PRIVATE_LIBGCC fixes that.
Let me know what you think, Maxime
Boris Brezillon (1): mtd: nand: add support for the TC58NVG2S0H chip
Hans de Goede (1): sunxi: Enable UBI and NAND support
Maxime Ripard (5): sunxi: Sync GR8 DTS and AXP209 with the kernel tools: sunxi: Add spl image builder nand: sunxi: Add options for the SPL NAND configuration scripts: sunxi: Build an raw SPL image sunxi: Add support for the CHIP Pro
Makefile | 3 +- arch/arm/dts/Makefile | 1 +- arch/arm/dts/axp209.dtsi | 6 +- arch/arm/dts/ntc-gr8-chip-pro.dts | 266 +++++++- arch/arm/dts/ntc-gr8.dtsi | 1132 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++- configs/CHIP_pro_defconfig | 27 +- drivers/mtd/nand/Kconfig | 16 +- drivers/mtd/nand/nand_ids.c | 3 +- include/configs/sunxi-common.h | 26 +- scripts/Makefile.spl | 12 +- tools/.gitignore | 1 +- tools/Makefile | 1 +- tools/sunxi-spl-image-builder.c | 1113 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++- 13 files changed, 2603 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-) create mode 100644 arch/arm/dts/ntc-gr8-chip-pro.dts create mode 100644 arch/arm/dts/ntc-gr8.dtsi create mode 100644 configs/CHIP_pro_defconfig create mode 100644 tools/sunxi-spl-image-builder.c
base-commit: d8bdfc80da39211d95f10d24e79f2e867305f71b