On Wednesday 30 August 2017 08:07 AM, Adam Ford wrote:
On Tue, Aug 29, 2017 at 8:05 AM, Adam Ford aford173@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Aug 29, 2017 at 6:41 AM, Sekhar Nori nsekhar@ti.com wrote:
On Tuesday 29 August 2017 03:29 PM, Adam Ford wrote:
On Tue, Aug 29, 2017 at 4:13 AM, Sekhar Nori nsekhar@ti.com wrote:
Hi Adam,
On Sunday 27 August 2017 08:31 PM, Adam Ford wrote:
I was trying to enable MTD Partitions to make loading the Kernel and FS easier from within U-Boot
The da850evm spi-flash partitions in Linux show
"U-Boot-SPL" @ offset 0, size 64K "U-Boot"; @ offset 0x00010000, size 512K "U-Boot-Env"; @ offset 0x00090000
According to board/davinci/da8xxevm/README.da850, we support AIS image format for SPI boot. This is a single image containing SPL and U-Boot.
Given this, I think having separate partitions for SPL and U-Boot does not make sense since thats not how its going to be used.
That's what I was thinking too, but I wasn't sure if someone had split SPL somehow to make it possible to update U-Boot via Linux or U-Boot itself.
However U-Boot shows the following:
CONFIG_SYS_SPI_U_BOOT_OFFS 0x8000 which would make the SPL partition 32K. CONFIG_SYS_SPI_U_BOOT_SIZE 0x40000 and the size of U-boot 256K instead of 512k.
CONFIG_ENV_SIZE (64 << 10) CONFIG_ENV_OFFSET (512 << 10) which is 0x80000 instead of Linux's 0x90000
It seems to me like the U-Boot and Linux should try and synchronize their partitions tables.
Right.
For people who want to burn Linux into the SPI flash it seems there there should be some consistency. I tried making the U-boot settings match the Linux ones, but it seems to hang between SPL and U-Boot, so I think the U-Boot offset in Linux might need to match U-Boot. Can you guys make some recomendations as to which is correct?
I have not tried it, but looks like the partitions we need are
"SPL/U-Boot AIS" @ offset 0, size 512K "U-Boot Environment" @ offset 512K, size 64K
I was thinking the same thing.
"Kernel/Spare" @ offset 576K, size 7552K "Mac Address" @ offset 8128K, size 64K (read only)
If U-Boot reads the MAC address from its environmental variables instead of using up an entire 64K for what conceivably is 6 bytes, could we free up this space to help grow the Kernel/Spare space?
If environment sector is erased, the mac address needs to be restored from SPI flash. Thats why I think it needs to remain as a read-only partition. Also, its just 64K more space, not sure if it will make a big difference in the overall scheme of things.
With an 8M flash, I think its futile to try to fit a modern filesystem on the flash.
If you are using DT boot, we cannot really change the partitions in device-tree because of DT backward-compatibility requirements. But we can fix da850evm_spiflash_part[] table in arch/arm/mach-davinci/board-da850-evm.c.
Wouldn't having two different partition tables between da850-evm.c and the DT cause confusion down the road? With DT being the future, why would we not try to eliminate any custom board files with just a single common davinci board file + board specific DT?
Thats ideal yes. But there is a lot of support in the da850-evm board file which does not have a DT equivalent yet. Thats why I have kept the board file around.
To help DT boot, we can pass fixed up mtdparts through environment variables. Something like what is done in 3f18ff07c81b ("ARM: keystone: Pass SPI MTD partition table via kernel command line").
This was ultimately was I was wanting to do. For some of the OMAP3 boards, removing the partition tree was accepted since the partition info was passed to the kernel. If we did this for DA850, we could simply elimiate the partition info in the Kernel (like some of the omap3 boards) and let the partition maps be defined by U-Boot would would guarantee consistency between them.
Actually, thinking a bit more, we cannot change the partition information in kernel at all since that means loss of data for anyone updating just the kernel.
We can however, pass updated kernel command line arguments in U-Boot so anyone updating the bootloader and erasing the environment sector gets updated partition information. This is likely to be the case where entire flash is being re-written and loss of data is not a concern.
That makes sense to me.
I'll send a U-Boot patch marked RFC later today with the MTD stuff enabled in U-Boot and changes to the bootargs to pass the MTD information to Linux.
I have a patch ready for review for U-Boot, but I had to make a few changes to the davinci_all_defconfig to get the MTD partitions to map correctly:
-CONFIG_MTD=m +CONFIG_MTD=y
Hmm. why the shift to built-in for MTD?
CONFIG_MTD_TESTS=m +CONFIG_MTD_CMDLINE_PARTS=y
This should be module as well.
+CONFIG_MTD_OF_PARTS=m
Are you OK with that? If so, I'll push a formal patch to Linux and then submit a subsequent patch for U-Boot marked RFC with MTD parts and CMD stuff enabled to pass the MTD partition info to Linux.
Sounds good.
Currently, I have it defined as: mtdparts=spi0.0:512k(u-boot.ais),64k(u-boot-env),7552k(kernel-spare),64k(MAC-Address)
Does that work for you?
Looks good to me!
Thanks, Sekhar