Android SD Boot on OMAP35x EVM

I was able to boot the Mistral Android image on a Samsung memory based EVM, just to be clear on the DIP switches below is a picture of my EVM setup for SD card booting.

I have not tried doing manual partitioning with the Mistral Android package, but the imaging with dd seemed to work for me, the SD card I used is just a generic 2GB SD card from Microcenter, I have heard of some SD cards having issues but with the variety you have tried I would like to think that is not the issue.

If you are not seeing any output on the serial port than there is probably some issue with the boot partition of the SD card, or the image was not written properly to the card. With the card that you wrote the image to with dd were you able to see the partitions properly if you insert the card into the EVM with a working Linux booted, or if you try to read it with a SD card reader (note that Windows seems to only pick up the first partition)?

Glad to hear it's possible! It's nice to know that I'm using the correct config for SW4 (and SW1) and a 2GB SD card is doable. I'll get a generic Microcenter SD card tomorrow and see how that goes.

I did pick up the Kingston SD Card at Microcenter's at-register bin, though I suppose that's not the same thing. 

I can open both the FAT and EXT3 partitions in Ubuntu 9.04, so I don't think there's any error partitioning & formatting the card. The files also appear to be correct (media, MLO, uImage, etc. on the FAT, Linux distribution on EXT3).

Thanks for the help!

Hopefully the Microcenter generic card works for you, if it does not I would be interested in the process you took with dd, though the fact that you can mount the card you wrote the image to with dd should imply that the process went ok.

This is my SD card booted setup with the image from dd, I apologize for the low quality camera.

They didn't have a Microcenter SD card, but I did pick up a Microcenter-brand 2GB microSD card. No luck, same problems =/.

Here's how I flashed the SD card via dd:

$ dmesg
...
 [62002.489738] sd 6:0:0:3: [sdf] 1982464 512-byte hardware sectors: (1.01 GB/968 MiB)
 [62002.490452] sd 6:0:0:3: [sdf] Write Protect is off
 [62002.490455] sd 6:0:0:3: [sdf] Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00
 [62002.490457] sd 6:0:0:3: [sdf] Assuming drive cache: write through
 [62002.491579] sd 6:0:0:3: [sdf] 1982464 512-byte hardware sectors: (1.01 GB/968 MiB)
 [62002.492326] sd 6:0:0:3: [sdf] Write Protect is off
 [62002.492329] sd 6:0:0:3: [sdf] Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00
 [62002.492332] sd 6:0:0:3: [sdf] Assuming drive cache: write through
 [62002.492336]  sdf: sdf1
 [62002.496482] sdf: p1 size 3964677 limited to end of disk

$ sudo dd if=omap3evm-android.sd.img of=/dev/sdf bs=1M count=400
 400+0 records in
 400+0 records out
 419430400 bytes (419 MB) copied, 94.8309 s, 4.4 MB/s

I'm starting to wonder if there's something wrong with the SD hardware. I tried booting into Linux (on my NAND, from PSP 1.0.2) and watching dmesg after inserting the SD card. There were no messages. I can't find anything in /dev/ that would seem to correspond to the mmc slot. Are you aware of a way to check if the mmc hardware on the omap35x is functional? I should note that the D1 LED (MMC1_1V8) turns on when I boot with SW4 set for mmcboot or the first time I boot into the PSP 1.0.2's linux and insert an SD card. It does not turn off when I remove the SD card, which seems odd to me.

Thanks for all your help, Solid Snake.

There could be something else going wrong here, you certainly should see the SD card show up in Linux when you insert it, inserting it should give you some results like below, and the MMC1_1V8 LED should only be on when the card is inserted.

[root@OMAP3EVM /]# mmc0: host does not support reading read-only switch. assuming write-enable.
mmcblk0: mmc0:0002 SD    1966080KiB
 mmcblk0: p1 p2

[root@OMAP3EVM /]# ls /dev | grep mmc
mmcblk0
mmcblk0p1
mmcblk0p2
[root@OMAP3EVM /]#

mjlyons said:

Are you aware of a way to check if the mmc hardware on the omap35x is functional?

Linux should be able to work with the SD card, at least it works for me in the SDK 1.0.2 kernel I am booting, this is a bad sign for the SD/MMC slot being functional. For a more specific functional test I would usually suggest the ITBOK utility (Is The Board OK) that Mistral provides and exists in the board_utilities folder of the SDK, though looking at the source files I do not see a SD/MMC test in there. You may want to contact Mistral for advice on how to proceed assuming you have damaged hardware, I am not sure if they have other board validation tests for the SD/MMC slot.

If you happen to have another OMAP3 EVM around it would be worth trying the SD card in it to see if it boots, assuming the same hardware configuration (dip switches and such), if it works on another EVM but not on yours that would be another indication of hardware issues.

Yeah, no /dev/mmc* on my EVM. [:|]

I tried booting the ITBOK utility off of UART3, but it stalls when the network card attempts to autodiscover the network. If you have any suggestions on how to get past that issue, I'm all ears. Regardless, it seems like there is some defect with the mmc interface on my EVM.

I've contacted Mistral about the matter and hopefully they can help me.

Thanks for your help!

So far I got that android distribution working.
However, it looks like no signals come out off the DVI connector. At least my monitor does not display anything.
Do you know how to display the content of the board's lcd on my monitor connected to the dvi slot?

thanks for you help

Maik