uClinux bootloader on Spartan-3e Starter Kit

Dec 15, 2006 2 Replies
J

Hi all,



I was abble to compile working uClinux core for the Spartan-3e Starter Kit. I was abble to program on board Flash Memory so the system.bit starts by itself.



Can anyone help me with the bootloader, so the whole project may start after power-on? I need to place the system.bit and linux core somewhere on the board so it may boot by itself...



Thanks Jerzy snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com



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B

If you make a zImage, you only have to jump to it and it will relocate itself to the location it was built for. It can even handle overlapping with the destination. If you have that image in flash, you could memory map the flash and jump into it, or you could pump it out into RAM (anywhere) and jump into it.

What do you have mapped at the reset vector 0xfffffffc? Flash? Block RAM?

Ben Jackson AD7GD http://www.ben.com/
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J

You need two things -

  1. Get the kernel image (image.bin) into onboard flash memory
  2. A trivial bootloader that resides in the FPGAs on-chip BRAM. This bootloader simply copies the kernel iamge from flash to the correct address in SDRAM, and jumps to the start of the image. Justa few lines of code.

There is a sample bootloader in the S3E-1600 and S3E-500 reference designs at PetaLogix.com:

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In addition to the EDK projects, in the binary demo packages you will also find scripts and documents describing how to get the kernel image into the flash.

Regards,

John

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