Porting to a new unsupported board: uboot fails to properly read the partition table

[Woodrow Shen]

Unless the board is based on powerpc/mips/armv6 arch, otherwise the porting
work should be simple to reach it.:)

On Tue, Dec 15, 2015 at 11:50 PM, Andrea Bernabei <
andrea.bernabei at canonical.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Tue, Dec 15, 2015 at 3:47 PM, Andrea Bernabei <
> andrea.bernabei at canonical.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Dec 15, 2015 at 3:37 PM, Woodrow Shen <woodrow.shen at canonical.com
>> > wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I wonder which board did you win to get ? :) Also, Is your board able to
>>> boot into Snappy successfully ?
>>> If yes, I think the partitions of image should be fine to work well.
>>>
>>> Before flashing image to SD card, you also can use `fdisk -lu
>>> /path/to/image` to check all the partitions.
>>> In my experiences of Snappy porting, I met a problem to break up the
>>> partitions generated by u-d-f,
>>> and I diff the hex between BSP image and Snappy. I found that u-d-f
>>> overwrote wrong the partition table
>>> due to bigger size of preloader binary, so I made the binary divide into
>>> two parts. Furthermore, The offsets
>>> also needed to be described in package.yaml in the OEM snap.
>>>
>>> The another interesting thing is that I need to make boot flag of 1st
>>> partition turn off, and then the board
>>> can boot to Snappy normally. XD
>>>
>>> This is my reflection, hope it can help you :)
>>>
>>>
>> Hi Woodrow,
>> thanks for getting back to me :)
>>
>> I haven't had the time to write a post about it, though I managed to get
>> Snappy to boot successfully on my board
>> just a couple of days after my help request here :)
>> (for the record: the issue I reported here was due to a very dumb mistake
>> on my side: I was flashing on sdb1 instead of sdb, so it wasn't
>> actually overwriting the partition table that was already available on
>> the SD)
>>
>> I have to say it has been quite easy, I was expecting porting to a new
>> board would have been much more difficult :)
>> I only had to patch and tweak u-boot, basically (and apply the apparmor
>> patches to the kernel, but that's almost automatic) :)
>>
>>
> I forgot the step where I defined the OEM package and the flashing offsets
> etc, but I think that was it :)
>
>
>> I should definitely post the modified bits so that others with the same
>> board can get Snappy, but
>> time is never enough :) It's on my TODO
>>
>> PS: the board is a Toradex Iris + Colibr iMX6DL module
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Andrea
>>
>>
>>
>>> Cheers,
>>>
>>> Woodrow
>>>
>>> On Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 1:15 AM, Andrea Bernabei <
>>> andrea.bernabei at canonical.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hello everyone,
>>>>
>>>> I recently won a dev board at a conference, and I'm trying to port
>>>> Snappy to it as a spare time pet project (yeah, this is the kind of things
>>>> I am into :D)
>>>>
>>>> I read the porting guide
>>>> https://developer.ubuntu.com/en/snappy/guides/porting/
>>>>
>>>> and Ogra's post at
>>>>
>>>> https://ograblog.wordpress.com/2015/01/25/porting-ubuntu-snappy-to-a-yet-unsupported-armhf-board/
>>>>
>>>> I have already patched the kernel with the required apparmor patches
>>>> and also uboot to add ext4 commands, and I successfully installed them on
>>>> the board.
>>>>
>>>> The problem I have at the moment is that the partition tablet of the
>>>> image created by ubuntu-device-flash (using my custom device tarball as
>>>> input) does not seem to be properly supported by uboot (and even some tools
>>>> like gparted).
>>>>
>>>> Here's what a few tools report when listing the partitions on the
>>>> *sdcard*
>>>> (I tried both with a 32Gb and a 4Gb sdcard)
>>>> - uboot's "mmc part" reports just 1 partition, type 0c
>>>> - gparted only shows 1 big partition, like uboot, with unknown
>>>> filesystem and lba flag
>>>> - parted shows 4 partitions
>>>> - kpartx shows 4 partitions
>>>>
>>>> Any advice?
>>>>
>>>> Andrea
>>>>
>>>> --
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>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>
>>
>


-- 
Regards,
Woodrow
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