On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 7:21 AM, Mitch Bradley <w...@firmworks.com> wrote: > Recompiling can work if you fine tune your build and download setup so > the crank-turn time is very short, like less than a minute. > > The very first thing I did when I joined OLPC was to fix the firmware > downloader. I was on a conference call with Richard and Jim Gettys and > some guys from Quanta. The report was that it took something like 15 > minutes to put in new firmware, using a DOS program that talked to a > serial download port on the EC that owned the SPI FLASH. My head > exploded. I knew that the hardware was capable of programming that size > SPI FLASH in less than a minute, so I started looking for bottlenecks > and quickly found them. >
I was talking with bunnie and xobs about doing something similar for the iMX6 platform that bootstraps from SDHC. Since they had already reverse-engineered the linux firmware for at least one type of SDHC card, we figured we could run that on the FPGA and interface the FPGA out to a microsdhc connection. This would allow us to compile uboot and install it to a ramdisk that would be immediately available to the iMX6 board to attempt to boot and debug. I will let you know my initial bringup of the SolidRun boards got me very adept at swapping microsdhc cards. ;-) But I do like having the bootloader right on the SDHC card. Virtually unbrickable. _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
