comparison doc/Flash-boot-wa @ 462:efb93f3e4ac7

doc/Flash-boot-wa: explanatory article added
author Mychaela Falconia <falcon@freecalypso.org>
date Sun, 10 Feb 2019 21:51:28 +0000
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461:10e168596dfd 462:efb93f3e4ac7
1 There is a tiny (120 bytes SREC file) program called flash-boot-wa that was
2 written in the spring of 2017 for the purpose of working around a problem that
3 happened on only one first-batch FCDEV3B board and never happened on any other
4 board - but Murphy's law had it that this one troubled board just had to be the
5 one on which my (Mother Mychaela's) very initial development and bring-up work
6 was done.
7
8 The defect exhibited on that one board was as follows: it had no problem booting
9 serially (fc-iram, fc-loadtool, fc-xram) and it had no problem booting from
10 flash in mode 0 (see the Flash-boot-modes article in the freecalypso-docs
11 repository), but booting from flash in mode 1 (the flash boot mode used by
12 FC Magnetite, which is our primary firmware) was troubled. The exact failure
13 mode and the root cause were never solved, but the issue most likely involved
14 the watchdog reset in some way (it occurs as part of flash boot mode 1 but not
15 in mode 0 and not in serial downloading), and because Calypso's FDP output goes
16 low during watchdog reset (or at least TI's CAL000 document says so), it is
17 plausible that the root cause involved the Spansion flash chip getting unhappy
18 as a result of being jerked with extra resets which don't meet its reset timing
19 requirements.
20
21 Our new FCDEV3B V2 boards no longer use Calypso's FDP output (it is left
22 unconnected) and feature a new flash reset circuit of our own design that meets
23 the reset timing requirements of our Spansion flash chip, hence the flash boot
24 problem seen on that one FCDEV3B S/N 001 board is not expected to recur on any
25 of our current or future boards. However, our little flash-boot-wa program is
26 kept around: removing a previously-released 120-byte program for no good reason
27 is not the way of FOSS.
28
29 This flash-boot-wa program is loaded serially via fc-iram; it disables the boot
30 ROM and jumps to address 0 (the opposite of what we do in compalstage for Mot
31 C1xx phones), thereby indirectly booting the made-for-boot-mode-1 firmware image
32 in the flash. The intended usage was as follows:
33
34 fc-iram -h fcfam /dev/ttyXXX /opt/freecalypso/target-bin/flash-boot-wa.srec rvinterf
35
36 It is also worth noting that fc-iram has been extended to support second program
37 invokation just like fc-xram (used in the invokation line above) just for this
38 peculiar use case. The flash-boot-wa.srec helper can also be booted via
39 fc-xram.