[Buildroot] SoCkit support question?

[Charles Manning]

On Thu, Feb 20, 2014 at 8:50 AM, Sébastien Bourdelin <
sebastien.bourdelin at savoirfairelinux.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I would like to submit the support for the SoCkit from Altera, but i have
> some questions regarding the bootloader step and need some advices on the
> best way to handle it.
>
> The SoC combines a hard processing system (HPS) and an FPGA, so the board
> design can change and the bootloader must provide a preloader.
>
> This preloader is normally generated using the Altera tools (Quartus,
> Qsys, bsp-editor) and results in source files defining the board that will
> be used in a patched u-boot from rocketboard (rocketboard is altera i
> guess).
> For more informations on this step, please look at :
> http://www.rocketboards.org/foswiki/Documentation/PreloaderUbootCustomization
>
> Then the preloader must be sign using an other tool from Altera (mkpimage)
> that comes with all the Altera dev environment.
> Maxime Hadjinlian has done a fork of this tool in GO (
> https://github.com/maximeh/mkpimage)
>
> If i use the sources from the rocketboard repository (
> http://git.rocketboards.org/?p=u-boot-socfpga.git;a=summary),
> regardless the branch, the preloader generated doesn't work, even if i'm
> signing it with the mkpimage tool from Altera (may be i'm missing something
> here).
>

Yes, many people have observed. this. There are some discussions going on
in the rocketboard rfi mailing list on that too,

If i use the Altera tools to generate my preloader using Qsys and an
> example design from Altera, then use the result sources files that define
> the u-boot/board/altera/socfpga/*, built u-boot and sign it with the
> mkpimage from Altera then it works.
>


Yesterday I posted a patch for uboot on the rocketboard RFI mailing list.
http://lists.rocketboards.org/pipermail/rfi/2014-February/001281.html

This patch adds a preloader signer (written in C) to the u-boot/tools as
well as adding this to the Makefile to run automatically (like say the OMAP
MLO signer does).

I am also putting together some build-root recipes to copy the binary over
(something like how the omap MLO is handled).



> So my question is what the best way to provide the support for this board
> in buildroot ?
>
> Assuming I have not made mistake, if you want to provide support for the
> bootloader of this board without using any tools from Altera, you must :
>
> - Use the patched u-boot from rocketboard
> - Define the board with a sample design, ie patch the sources in
> u-boot/board/altera/socfpga/*
> - Generate the bootloader (u-boot) and preloader (u-boot SPL)
> - Sign the preloader with a fork to mkpimage tools (recode the mkpimage
> from Maxim  Hadjinlian in C ?)
>
> Another approach would be to consider that the end user must provide their
> bootloader and flash it, the buildroot board config take care of building
> only Linux and the rootfs.
>

I think it is better to build the preloader from buildroot too.

-- Charles
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