Uboot

[raj123]

Hi,

I need to upgrade my uboot image and I was looking into the forum but want to clarify few things...

How many different ways we can upgrade uboot. I see tftp,usb and sheeva Installer. What is the preferred method of upgrading it.

When do u actually use Sheeva Installer (Only during it is fully blown out or any other time).

Thanks in advance.

Raj

[NewIT_Marcus]

Hi,

I need to upgrade my uboot image and I was looking into the forum but want to clarify few things...

How many different ways we can upgrade uboot. I see tftp,usb and sheeva Installer. What is the preferred method of upgrading it.

When do u actually use Sheeva Installer (Only during it is fully blown out or any other time).

Thanks in advance.

Raj

I found TFTP to be the easiest way to upgrade U-Boot. (I installed a TFTP server on my Ubuntu desktop PC).

When you use the installer, you wipe everything on your target (be the target SD card or NAND). Therefore you don't expect to use it often, but it may well be the very first thing you choose to do with your plug, if you want to use a different file system (e.g. UBIFS on the NAND drive, or Debian instead of Ubuntu).

Creating a bootable SD card using the installer is non-destructive to your NAND, although it does alter your U-Boot environment variables, and you would probably need to manually update them for (for example) multi-booting.

[trampjuice]

Yes - I would just like to add its much more difficult to use the SD card method to install the uboot.bin image. u-boot is very limited in handling usb devices. I managed to install a corrupt uboot.bin image due to the very limited support in u-boot for USB cards. It ended up totally bricked. I had then to spend the day compling openocd, and the right driver library for the JTAG port, sort out the sheevaplug.cfg for openocd (the one thats referenced by the plug computer guide is a mess that doesnt work - you have to use the cfg files in the tlc directory) and telnet 444 into the openocd server to finally upgrade the damaged uboot.bin. Be-jesus!

Don't do things by halfs - setup a tftp server on the desktop and do it that way or you risk jtagging the box. The only reason I didn't was that the sheevas ethernet cable wouldn't reach the sheevabox when I had its serial cable plugged into my desktop, to interrupt u-boot, so i opted for the sd card method. How I regret that now!