Hi everybody.

Can someone can show me the full procedure how to send a kernel and build a filesystem on the nand flash of the evaluation board of AT91SAM9260-EK ?

I tried many things but I have some error at the end.... the following is what I did.

1-Install Sam-Ba and be sure that all jumpers are present on the board.
2-Use Hyperterminal to see romboot (after powering the card). Also, I must see that the card is detected by Windows USB
driver.... /usb/Arm0.
3-Execute the AT91SAM9260_demo_linux_NandFlash.bat file provided by Atmel. It installs U-Boot (the batch file use samba
utilities).
4-Reset the ev-kit. UBoot is running.
5-Configure U-Boot by setting some environment variable like ipaddress, serverip, bootargs, etc.
6-Download with TFTP my kernel image uImage into 0x21500000 (ram) and rootfs.arm.ext2.gz into 0x21100000 (ram).
7-Boot from 0x21500000. Linux kernel is decompressed and run.

Until then, it works. Linux runs in RAM. My bootargs variable is ---> mem=64M console=ttyS0,115200 initrd=0x21100000,3145728 root=/dev/ram0 rw

At this point we don't have a PERSISTENT file system because everything run into RAM. So I tried the following....

8-flash_eraseall /dev/mtd3
9-Tftp the file rootfs.arm.jffs2 (download).
10-nandwrite -p /dev/mtd3 rootfs.arm.jffs2

So now, the File system of type JFFS2 is on mtd3 device.

After a REBOOT, nothing happen !!!
I think that the Kernel for booting is not persistent into the NAND or the Uboot does not know where to jump, etc.
I have also a problem about SAVING ENVIRONMENT VARIABLE. When I do saveenv (in UBoot), it says that my block 3 is bad.
So each time a reboot my eval board, I need to rewrite the different environment variable.

Anyway, something is missing or I don't understand. I think that 90% of the job is done... how to boot from a persistent Linux on nandflash ? I did not see any complete procedure on the web... I hope someone will have the time to write a small walkthrough. I really need a persistent Linux in my evaluation board.

Thanks.


NOTE: (as seen by cat /proc/mtd)

mtd0 is boot
mtd1 is uboot
mtd2 kernel
mtd3 disk
mtd4 spi0.1-AT45DB642

Sounds to me like the uboot env is being saved to DataFlash and not NAND. You might want to try the prebuilt NANDFlash bootstrap and uboot files from http://www.linux4sam.org . My NAND boot setup has 2 MTD single block MTD partitions for uboot env. The save alternates between them. So I have:

mtd0 - boot
mtd1 - uboot
mtd2 - uboot env1
mtd3 - uboot env2
mtd4 - kernel
mtd5 - RFS