Hei hei,
I was updating u-boot for our target hardware in the past few days. We have a board here very similar in design to the Atmel AT91SAM9G20-EK. Migrating our patches step by step from v2010.09 to v2011.09 replacing code based on at91 legacy code took a while but was succesful. Output on the serial console (debug console of the SoC) was and should be like this (some output of at91bootstrap before u-boot):
Start AT91Bootstrap... HW_INIT AT91Bootstrap successful... NAND-Flash uChipID: 0xADDA loaded image into RAM
U-Boot 2011.06-00027-g21b18a4 (May 08 2012 - 15:03:20)
CPU: AT91SAM9G20 Crystal frequency: 18.432 MHz CPU clock : 396.288 MHz Master clock : 132.096 MHz DRAM: 32 MiB NAND: 256 MiB In: serial Out: serial Err: serial Net: macb0 Hit keys 'is' to stop autoboot (3 seconds).
I know, still v2011.06 but worked. Now with v2011.12 and v2012.04 output of the »greeting line« and CPU info produces garbage, see:
Start AT91Bootstrap... HW_INéÅÍɹÁåÙ5!é5)I5éÍÉ5¥essful5)ÿWARNING: Caches not enabled NAND: 256 MiB!é5)5 0xADDA In: serial¹ÁÑ¡5RAM Out: serial5!é5))5) Err: serial Net: macb0 Hit keys 'is' to stop autoboot (3 seconds).
The console works in the end, but in between there's just garbage. I tried moving the call to at91_seriald_hw_init() from board_init() to board_early_init_f) but this didn't change the behaviour. I also tried to find out what was changed in u-boot source since 2011.09 but this is a lot and just looking over commit messages in git I didn't get a clue.
Has someone had similar problems and maybe a solution? Or is anyone interested in debugging this and could help me with a start?
Greets Alex