How to build u-boot spi images

ROCK 5 Series
1

Hi, I’ve received my rock5 yesterday and so far I’m very pleased with that little monster.
Currently I’m trying to boot from a intel optane NVMe, which gives a little bit of trouble, but let me recap:
Booting from SD with a modified dtb (for pcie3 2x2) works nice and i can access both SSDs. Booting from SPI however does not work; My guess is that pcie3 is configured for 4x and so the actual data disk is not seen.
So I’ve checked out GitHub - radxa/u-boot at stable-5.10-rock5 and patched the dts accordingly. After installing the rktools and the cross compiler u-boot builds, but that is where I’m stuck right now. The official SPI image from here https://wiki.radxa.com/Rock5/install/spi

$ file rock-5b-spi-image-g49da44e116d.img
rock-5b-spi-image-g49da44e116d.img: DOS/MBR boot sector; partition 1 : ID=0xee, start-CHS (0x0,0,1), end-CHS (0x3ff,254,63), startsector 1, 32767 sectors, extended partition table (last)

does look quite different to what my u-boot looks

$ file uboot.img
uboot.img: Device Tree Blob version 17, size=2560, boot CPU=0, string block size=197, DT structure block size=2000

So the big question now is: how do i get from my custom u-boot image to an image ready to be flashed to SPI?

Any help is much appreciated!
Thanks & best!

1 Like
2

getting closer:

$ losetup loop0 rock-5b-spi-image-g49da44e116d.img
$ fdisk -l /dev/loop0
Disk /dev/loop0: 16 MiB, 16777216 bytes, 32768 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: E42BCB16-3C32-4BF8-8DBE-6E34100702F8

Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/loop0p1 64 7167 7104 3.5M Linux filesystem
/dev/loop0p2 7168 7679 512 256K Linux filesystem
/dev/loop0p3 7680 8063 384 192K Linux filesystem
/dev/loop0p4 8064 8127 64 32K Linux filesystem
/dev/loop0p5 8128 8191 64 32K Linux filesystem
/dev/loop0p6 8192 16383 8192 4M Linux filesystem
/dev/loop0p7 16384 32734 16351 8M Linux filesystem

now i only need to figure what goes where.

3

Turns out this is well documented here https://wiki.radxa.com/Rock3/install/spi
I have a working SPI image now that detects the other SSD and boots from it.
The Linux on the SSD doesn’t like things so much, but that’s different problem xD
If anyone is interested here is the SPI image rock-5b-spi-image_pcie2x2.img.zip (698.4 KB)

2 Likes
4

Looks like the “file” utility is a bit behind on recognizing GPT images.

5

@herger did you use the Rock 3A files (idbloader and uboot.itb) even if you’re on Rock 5?
When booting does the blue and green LEDs are powered on and do not blink?
Eventually does U-boot console appears on the screen when booting?

BR

6

Hi @Thomas_P,
I did use the Rock5 files, just followed the image doc for the Rock3.
I really cannot tell you what the LEDs did, over e year ago, but u-boot was displayed nicely.
In the meantime i switched to use a real UEFI [https://github.com/edk2-porting/edk2-rk3588] which outperforms the u-boot in every aspect (except that a year ago, when i flashed the last time they did not have support for the PCIe 2x2 setup i needed the custom u-boot for. that might have changed by now)

best

7

@herger I didn’t expect an answer so fast!
Thank you, I just tried out with EDK2 and at it seems to work painlessly :raised_hands:t2:

I will now try to find some materials to make a TFTP boot from it,
Thanks again :pray:

8

As the link to the SPI image above is dead, here is the file re-uploaded rock-5b-spi-image_pcie2x2.img.zip (698.4 KB).

Best

2 Likes
10

Right, there is the edit button :joy:
I’ve updated the solution post.

11

Wiki is not maintained any more.

The supported way to install SPI bootloader is through rsetup. This was moved to a deeper menu level though.

12

Hello.
On Rock5 ITX, I manage to build a SPINOR boot image from a microSD image very simply.

Let’s say you have a MMC image from armbian (the decompressed version)
IMAGE=Armbian_24.8.3_Rock-5-itx_bookworm_vendor_6.1.75_minimal.img

On your PC, build a spinor flash image:

# 0x0000 - 0x8000 : zeros
dd if=/dev/zero of=zero.bin count=64
# 0x8000 - 0x1000000 : from RKNS header ...
dd if=$IMAGE of=rkns.bin skip=64 count=$((32768-64))
# merge
cat zero.bin rkns.bin > spinor_image.bin

From a running linux on your rock5 device, flash on spinor then reboot

# flash 
flashcp -v  spinor_image /dev/mtd0
reboot

Since the armbian /boot/boot.scr uboot script, is loaded from default uboot env from MMC, but also NVME drive, it is sufficient to boot a kernel located on NVME drive.

Note: this same image is also suitable for eMMC. it will boot the same way a kernel located on NVME if eMMC is empty except this 16MiB image.