Jon, Thanks for the answers, they are very helpful. I was trying the ARM bootloader approach and keep having problems. I will start using the UEFI approach.
Eric
-----Original Message----- From: Jon Medhurst (Tixy) [mailto:tixy@linaro.org] Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2013 9:47 AM To: Eric Huang Cc: linaro-android@lists.linaro.org Subject: Re: Android boot failure on TC2
On Wed, 2013-02-13 at 08:07 -0800, Eric Huang wrote:
Another two questions
- Regarding the SD card: ARM support is telling me SDHC card is not supported, is that the case? If so, how can a 4G card be used?
I believe ARM's bootloader doesn't support SDHC, or it didn't use to. This isn't a hardware issue though because UEFI and Linux do support SDHC.
- Regarding UEFI: Is UEFI required to boot Android image ?
It's the officially documented and promoted method.
As an alternative, some people put the kernel, dtb, and initrd into NOR flash, then use ARM's bootloader to load and run these. (There are some old instructions lurking around for this from before we got UEFI working, see the "Boot Monitor (TC2 only)" section of http://www.linaro.org/members/arm/ve_12.09#tab2
Another alternative some people use it to the A5 CoreTile version of U-Boot, see [1]. This also works on TC2 though it only gives you 1GB of RAM by default - apparently adding "mem=2048m@0x80000000" to the kernel commandline fixes this. The prebuilt A5 U-Boot in boot partition of the Android image (uefi_v2p-ca5s.bin) probably will work, I've never tried this method.
[1] http://lists.linaro.org/pipermail/linaro-dev/2012-October/014136.html