I have made a custom board similar to AT91SAM9261EK but with NOR Flash (4MBytes - Spansion).

I have enabled the CFI support under MTD device drivers under 'make ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux- menuconfig'.

I have also set a mtdparts argument in U-boot for kernel startup.

However, on Linux startup, I did not see that the mtd partitions are listed on the console output.

I intend to put rootfs (a small one) in the NOR Flash.

Anyone who can help to advise what could have gone wrong.

Thanks in advance.

The u-boot (at least the one from atmel) was so buggy, that it took a week to get it booting from nor. For example, the timeout code was broken and so a lot of time-based operations got timeouts too soon.
Anyway, there's a lot to do to get it booting. Good luck!