kwuartboot - Boot a Kirkwood Soc from the UART port

Introduction

This utility can be used to boot a Kirkwood SoC from the UART port. It has only been tested on the Dreamplug so far, but it should work on other models using the same SoC.

THERE IS NO WARRANTY. However, it does work nicely for me!

Download

Download the tarball from here.

Build

To build, type:

make

There is no installation for now, just run it from where it builds.

Usage

Let us say your JTAG/UART is on /dev/ttyUSB0 and you have a u-boot.kwb you want to test.

  1. Power off the SoC
  2. Make sure any terminal emulator is disconnected
  3. Run the program as follows
           $ ./kwuartboot /dev/ttyUSB0 uboot.kwb
          
  4. Power on the SoC, and wait while the transfer completes.
  5. Connect the terminal emulator and it should be running u-boot

Notes

Because of the fact the programming is sending a series of bytes to the UART while the SoC boots up, it is not 100% reliable. It does work about 75% of the time for me though. if it doesn't work, just repeat the procedure.

I have an example u-boot.kwb for Dreamplug only. You can get it from here