Booting on AR9331 based Easylink EL-M150

[Adrian Chadd]

... .and don't replace the uboot. There may be board variations that
are hard-coded in the uboot. Tsk. :)



-a


On 11 January 2015 at 12:24, Adrian Chadd <adrian at freebsd.org> wrote:
> Yeah, there's calibration data in the flash chip. You should be very careful. :)
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> -a
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> On 11 January 2015 at 12:17, Bernd Walter <ticso at cicely7.cicely.de> wrote:
>> 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.