Hi there Thanks for the advice. The DTP append work-around sounds like a horrible hack that might come to bite me later, so I am going to rather go with re-introducing SMDK6410 back into the U-boot and maintain it. The benefits are then of course that we will be retrofitting something modern in the field, as opposed to a loader that is 7 years old.
I will clone the current mainline and start investigating how to best approach this. Thanks and Regards, Jason Mitchell On 12 April 2018 at 16:01, Tom Rini <tr...@konsulko.com> wrote: > On Thu, Apr 12, 2018 at 09:04:20AM +0200, Jason Mitchell wrote: > > Good day all > > > > I am currently faced with a task of having to run new software on ageing > > hardware. We have currently about 1000 units in the field of a machine > that > > runs Windows CE using the Samsung S3C6410. > > > > Because these are considerable assets its not a simple case of replacing > > them with new, more modern hardware. > > > > The goal is to be able to get these existing boards to run Ubuntu so that > > we can run GoLang applications, so we need the GUI with just a relatively > > recent browser. > > > > The board in question is a near perfect clone of the SMDK6410, which was > > supported fully in U-boot in the past, indeed I can select SMDK6410 and > > compile a working U-boot using 1.3.4 sources > > > > After much effort I managed to get a tailored (tailored as in having > > changed the memory configuration to match the hardware) U-boot V1.3.4 > > compiled and running for this chip, the problem now, obviously we have a > > fairly recent Linux kernel compiled and it won't boot because the Device > > Tree Blob doesn't exist on such an old version of U-boot. > > > > So my questions are: > > > > - Has anyone perhaps created a branch or fork of the current or nearly > > current version of U-boot and patched in this support. I see a lot of > > Chinese websites where they seem to have done this but the language > barrier > > is a big problem. Also a lot of dead links are another problem. > > > > - If there isn't something out there, would it be possible to run through > > the steps with me to add support for this CPU again. I don't mind doing > the > > work, the main issue is I have no clue how U-boot actually works > internally. > > > > I have FULL JTAG access to this board, with a perfectly functional > OpenOCD > > setup. This is how we are able to program versions of U-boot into the > FLASH. > > There's two options: > 1) You can re-introduce support for the SMDK6410 into mainline U-Boot > and be an active maintainer of it. It was removed due to lack of active > maintainers. > > 2) You can, for Linux, use the "appended DTB" work-around to boot a > modern kernel from an old bootloader. > > -- > Tom > _______________________________________________ U-Boot mailing list U-Boot@lists.denx.de https://lists.denx.de/listinfo/u-boot