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[davest]

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Hi,

In anticipation of starting production of our 9260 based product, I need some help with providing a procedure to our factory personnel  for getting the flash file image into new boards.  Could someone propose the following procedures?

1. Creating an '.img' file from the engineering board flash to a PC (PC could be linux or non).

2. Loading the '.img' file into a new 9260 board from a non-linux (Windows) PC.

Using ethernet would be my first choice.  That may require some extra steps I imagine to get a temporary IP address into the new board.

Thanks in advance!!

   

[admin]

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The process depends on the type of the FLASH file system you choose for your application.

If JFFS2 is used then you can prebuild the JFFS2 image with mkfs.jffs2 utility and write to the NAND FLASH using the U-boot command nand write.jffs2.  If you use YAFFS2 then you need to boot to either RAM disk or SD/USB root file system then mount and copy the entire file system to the NAND FLASH partition.

For JFFS2 you can,

1) Boot your board to a RAM disk image or a USB/SD card, mount the FLASH partition, and create a tar file of entire FLASH partiton.

2) untar the file system into a directory on your desktop machine and use mkfs.jffs2 utility to make a JFFS2 iamge,
            mkfs.jffs2 -l -d rootfs -s 2048 -e 131072 -v -p -n -o 9260rootfs.img
  Place the JFFS2 image in the TFTP server directory

3) Boot to U-boot command line and use the following sequence of commands to load the image,
  nand erase 0x400000 <length>
  set ipaddr <board-ip-address>
  set serverip <TFTP-server-ip-address>
  t 0x21000000 <image-file-name>
  nand write.jffs2 0x21000000 0x400000 $(filesize)

The U-boot has a nice scripting feature that can execute JFFS2 formated script file.  After you have done creating the JFFS2 image of your file system, you can put all the U-boot commands above in a text file and convert it to a JFFS2 image file and run it with autoscr command at the U-boot command prompt.

[davest]

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Thanks...

But is there not a complement to the 'nand write' feature that would allow the entire flash contents to be put in a file?  That would insure that the replicated units would have the exact code in them as the master unit.

Regards, Dave

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The NAND chips have bad blocks and each chip usually has bad blocks at different locations.  Reading all the blocks from your "master" chip and copy them straight block by block to your "target" chip may not work.  The U-boot write.jffs2 is designed to work around the bad block problem.