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Loading U-Boot via TFTP/USB

Kengineer
Prodigy 190 points

Other Parts Discussed in Thread: UNIFLASH

Hello,

I was wondering about booting U-Boot on a brand new AM335x board without any bootloader loaded in flash or anything. We're talking blank from scratch board (assume we're just saying it has the processor and external RAM).

I was wondering particularly about USB booting via TFTP. If I recall correctly booting through USB is basically like a virtual ethernet interface which can use TFTP. So I was wondering, is it possible to load the X-Loader/SPL via USB/TFTP which will set up the external RAM and such and then also using USB/TFTP then load the U-boot image into the external RAM and run it. 

So instead of needing to insert a SD card with the images on it, just load U-Boot straight from USB/TFTP. Is this possible? I'd seen a lot of guides about using USB/TFTP but didn't really know if it could be used like this since in order to get U-boot loaded you're using two separate bootloader images.

  • 0
    TI__Mastermind 30836 points

    Absolutely! The process might be a little different depending on the host you want to boot from.

    For Linux, you need to set up DHCP and TFTP properly. Our SDK Setup script helps with this quite a bit. Depending on what DHCP Server you choose to use, you might have to restart it when the USB interface is recognized in order to get it looking at the new connection.

    For Windows, I would use our Uniflash tool documented here:

    https://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/Sitara_Uniflash_Quick_Start_Guide

    In either case, you need a SPL/u-boot combo set up to boot from the appropriate interface. Again, the SDK provides some default configs that should help with this quite a bit.

    I've successfully booted and mounted a  rootfs over NFS all over USB on a Beaglebone Black (from both Linux and Windows).

    Let us know if you have further questions.