14:15 <ashak> Hi, i've been fiddling with an old allwinner 23 based tablet. I managed to work out how to get the device into FEL mode. Following on from that i'v been looking at booting u-boot over usb. But i'm kinda stuck. For building u-boot it says: make CROSS_COMPILE=aarch64-linux-gnu- <your-board>_defconfig

14:15 <ashak> The closest thing I could find to my board was sun8i_a23_evb_defconfig, i don't know whether that's the right thing to do or not?

14:15 <ashak> Then to actually compile I it seems I need to point it as trusted firmware? But I can't find anything else about what this trusted firmware is or where I might obtain it

14:17 <gnarface> ashak: https://github.com/ARM-software/arm-trusted-firmware

14:18 <gnarface> not sure if that link is fresh but try it

14:19 <gnarface> not sure if that's your defconfig or not but it sounds like you have the right idea

14:22 <ashak> thanks for that, i'll keep digging. I have no real clue what i'm doing, just reading and trying to at least make decisions that seem sensible. sun8i_23 sems to be my SoC. I don't (yet) understand what the evb part of sun8i_a23_evb stands for. But since it's the only one I concluded that it had to be a good starting point if nothing else

14:27 <gnarface> in my notes i have: ARCH="arm64" CROSS_COMPILE="aarch64-linux-gnu-" ...

14:28 <gnarface> not exactly sure why i had to specify ARCH too.

14:29 <gnarface> i built it on devuan (debian) so maybe it was a multiarch thing i dunno

14:31 <gnarface> i built on unstable so maybe it was just a bug

14:35 <ashak> kind of feel like i'm misunderstanding something. There seem to be no sun* targets in arm trusted firmware for anything other than a few starting sun50i_

14:36 <gnarface> hmm. well for my pinebook i was told to use the one called "allwinner"

14:40 <ashak> oh wait. the allwinner a23 seems to be based on the arm cortex a7, which seems to be a 32bit microprocessor. So presumably trying to compile 64 bit things isn't right :)

14:43 <gnarface> oh, probably

14:52 <ashak> ok, so using sun8i_a23_evb_defconfig and compiling with arm-linux-gnueabihf seems to work. Then running sunxi-fel -v uboot u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin, looks to have been successful. Not sure what (if anything) I should see by doing that. But it's a start

14:54 <ashak> I can't get the uart to work on this device. It's very similar to another device on the wiki, attaching to the same pads and hooking them up to an rpi uart just gives me garbled output at all baud rates

14:55 <ashak> ah, u-boot shoul dnow be scnning various locations for boot.scr.

14:55 <gnarface> again for the pinebook specifically, and a couple other pine64 boards, i was told not to connect the transmit at power on because it can corrupt the output

14:56 <gnarface> not sure if that is safe advice as a general rule though

14:57 <gnarface> doesn't seem to usually matter either with the particular serial adapter i have, but sometimes it can screw with it if i wiggle the connection too much

15:05 <ashak> ooh, I do get serial in FEL

15:05 <gnarface> hooraaay!

15:16 <apritzel> ashak: evb typically stands for "evaluation board", so that's probably some demo board from Allwinner

15:17 <apritzel> many devices seem to copy a lot from those boards, but of course there could be any number of differences between your board and the EVB

15:17 <ashak> ah, that makes sense. thanks

15:18 <apritzel> ashak: I'd rather try one of the generic Q8 table defconfigs

15:18 <apritzel> configs/q8_a23_tablet_800x480_defconfig

15:18 <apritzel> (there are two others with different resolutions)

15:19 <ashak> Thanks, i'll take a look

15:19 <apritzel> it seems like back in the days there were a lot of tables that were very similar, so one config can run on a lot of them

15:19 <apritzel> that might even give you display output

15:22 <ashak> ah nice, it does

15:51 <ashak> I don't seem to be able to make sunxi-fel read work. The command times out and I have to reset the device into FEL mode again.

16:25 <apritzel> ashak: you mean after you launched U-Boot?

16:26 <apritzel> ashak: and what are you trying to read, exactly?

16:27 <apritzel> if that is DRAM, before you have run the SPL to initialise it, it will just hang. And if you load U-Boot via FEL (and execute it), FEL will be gone.

16:30 <ashak> I reset and entered FEL again. Then I was trying sunxi-fel read 0x43000000 0x20000 script.bin

16:31 <ashak> After mentioning it here I found a bit further on in the FEL wiki page tht mentioned the same error I was seeing

16:32 <ashak> The suggestion is use an alternative method of entering FEL that initialiss to boot1

16:32 <ashak> But I haven't had a chance to do that yet as it seemed I could possibly get the same data from within android

16:33 <ashak> And yes, using script_extractor I have managed to obtain script.bin and convert tht to script.fex

16:40 <ashak> I haven't managed to obtian the boot info though. As that also requires reading via FEL. I did get meminfo from within android too.

16:55 <apritzel> that address you give to sunxi-fel above is DRAM

16:55 <apritzel> if you issue this command right after entering normal FEL, it will indeed hang, because the DRAM controller is not initialised

16:56 <apritzel> what you probably wanted to do is to read DRAM after some Allwinner boot0/boot1 already ran on the tablet, and loaded script.bin into DRAM