[elbe-users] ARM allwinner msdoshd: Specify binary blob

[Manuel Traut]

Hi Ralf,

On Mon, Jan 29, 2018 at 09:17:11PM +0100, Ralf Schlatterbeck wrote:
> I'm in the process of building elbe configs for various ARM allwinner
> boards. Several questions:
> - Has this already been done?
>   I currently have Olimex A20-Lime2, Olimex A20-Micro, BananaPi M2+EDU
>   and the Olimex DIY laptop with A64 CPU (although this is lower prio)

That sounds interesting! Feel free to post your XML's here! I'm sure it would
be nice to have them in the 'examples' directory.

> - The bootloader needs to be put into an MSDOS image at position 8k, how
>   do I specify this? According to the schema reference at
>   https://elbe-rfs.org/docs/sphinx/article-elbe-schema-reference.html
>   the binary blob gets a filename (?) and the description tells me
>   "binary blob that is dd’ed to the specified offset". But *how* do I
>   specify this offset?
> - How do I specify the offset of the first partition in an msdoshd, is
>   this fixed at 1024k (2048 512-byte blocks)?
> - Is there a way to put boot config, kernel and dtb into the first
>   partition without inserting them into a .tar into the .xml elbe file,
>   or is this still the preferred method?

i did this like this:

    <images>
      <msdoshd>
        <name>sdcard.img</name>
        <size>512MiB</size>
        <binary blocksize="1024" offset="8">u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin</binary>
        <partition>
          <size>remain</size>
          <label>root</label>
        </partition>
      </msdoshd>
    </images>
    <fstab>
      <bylabel>
        <label>root</label>
        <mountpoint>/</mountpoint>
        <fs>
          <type>ext4</type>
          <tune2fs>-i 0</tune2fs>
        </fs>
      </bylabel>
    </fstab>
    <norecommend />
    <finetuning>
      <mv path="/usr/lib/linux-image-lx-4.4.1/sun8i-a33-sinlinx-sina33.dtb">/boot/sun8i-a33-sinlinx-sina33.dtb</mv>
      <rm>/usr/lib/linux-image-4.4.1*</rm>
      <mv path="/boot/vmlinuz-lx-4.4.1">/boot/zImage</mv>
      <t2p_mv path="/boot/u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin">u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin</t2p_mv>
    </finetuning>
    <pkg-list>
      <pkg>u-boot-sina33</pkg>
      <pkg>linux-image-lx-4.4.1</pkg>
...

I even used the u-boot from the official debian repos :)
However for some reason i needed to build an own kernel and was not able to use
the linux-image-armmp.

> - I'm building on Debian Stretch for a Debian Stretch target. What
>   version of elbe should I install?

The one from 'deb http://debian.linutronix.de/elbe stretch main' should be fine.

If the boards are quiet similar the new 'variants' feature available in the
elbe-testing repo might be interesting ;) [0], [1]

  Manuel

[0] http://lists.linutronix.de/pipermail/elbe-devel/2017-December/000987.html
[1] https://elbe-rfs.org/docs/sphinx/releases_v2.9.6/elbe-preprocess.html

> Thanks for your help
> Ralf
> 
> -- 
> Dr. Ralf Schlatterbeck                  Tel:   +43/2243/26465-16
> Open Source Consulting                  www:   http://www.runtux.com
> Reichergasse 131, A-3411 Weidling       email: office at runtux.com
> 
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