Booting on AR9331 based Easylink EL-M150

[Bernd Walter]

On Sun, Jan 11, 2015 at 10:16:49AM -0800, Adrian Chadd wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've had this issue reported by someone else - a tplink AR934x based
> thing. I wonder if it's an updated uboot related thing.
> 
> So the TL;DR is this.
> 
> uboot "bootm" doesn't boot a kernel image - it boots a uboot
> application. The application has a uboot header with details about
> "where it should be unpacked", "where it should be executed", etc. The
> tool that we're using is in ports but from an older uboot. It's
> possible the header contents are now .. wrong.
> 
> So, the flash address used by the "bootm" comand is 0x9f(blah), and
> it'll unpack to wherever it says in the uboot header, and then execute
> wherever it says. Everything above is wrong - Load, entry, size, etc -
> and so that needs to be debugged.
> 
> I have a tplink in a box that has the same issue, so I'll go see what
> the story is.

Great.

My EL-M150 module has the same hynx memory chip as the carambola 2 I compared
against, just the flash size ist different (winbond 25Q128 vs 25Q64).
Don't know if the SPI flash is hardcoded somehow, otherwise the carambola 2
u-boot should work IMHO.

Is there anything important in the flash, like calibration data, which
can be trashed by tampering with it?
Or failed parsing by a different u-boot version?
Guess I should dump the SPI data to tftp server anyway.
Never programmed a 25Q myself, but can't be too hard in case I brick it.

-- 
B.Walter <bernd at bwct.de> http://www.bwct.de
Modbus/TCP Ethernet I/O Baugruppen, ARM basierte FreeBSD Rechner uvm.