----------------------------- NAND boot on PPC440 platforms ----------------------------- This document describes the U-Boot NAND boot feature as it is implemented for the AMCC Sequoia (PPC440EPx) board. The PPC440EP(x)/GR(x) cpu's can boot directly from NAND FLASH, completely without NOR FLASH. This can be done by using the NAND boot feature of the 440 NAND flash controller (NDFC). Here a short desciption of the different boot stages: a) IPL (Initial Program Loader, integrated inside CPU) ------------------------------------------------------ Will load first 4k from NAND (SPL) into cache and execute it from there. b) SPL (Secondary Program Loader) --------------------------------- Will load special U-Boot version (NUB) from NAND and execute it. This SPL has to fit into 4kByte. It sets up the CPU and configures the SDRAM controller and the NAND controller so that the special U-Boot image can be loaded from NAND to SDRAM. This special image is build in the directory "nand_spl". c) NUB (NAND U-Boot) -------------------- This NAND U-Boot (NUB) is a special U-Boot version which can be started from RAM. Therefore it mustn't (re-)configure the SDRAM controller. On 440EPx the SPL is copied to internal SRAM before the NAND controller is set up. While still running from cache, I experienced problems accessing the NAND controller. Example: Build and install NAND boot image for Sequoia (440EPx): a) Configure for sequoia with NAND boot support: # make sequoia_nand_config b) Build image(s) # make This will generate the SPL image in the "nand_spl" directory: nand_spl/u-boot-spl.bin Also another image is created spanning a whole NAND block (16kBytes): nand_spl/u-boot-spl-16k.bin The main NAND U-Boot image is generated in the toplevel directory: u-boot.bin A combined image of u-boot-spl-16k.bin and u-boot.bin is also created: u-boot-nand.bin This image should be programmed at offset 0 in the NAND flash: # tftp 100000 /tftpboot/sequoia/u-boot-nand.bin # nand erase 0 60000 # nand write 100000 0 60000 September 07 2006, Stefan Roese <sr@denx.de>