Choke… update: just been surfing Sakoman’s U-Boot GIT repository and it looks like its got support for BeagleBoard’s OTG controller and USB gadget device support too… !!!
No idea if this stuff is working, if its in Sakoman’s experimental patches or if its in the main line U-Boot…
but I’ll be checking it out first thing tomorrow morning… (assuming this hangover I’m working on isn’t too bad 
The latest U-Boot already has support for TFTP boot. However, so far as I’m aware its doesn’t support the BeagleBoard’s USB controller or the relevant USB ethernet dongles… Those could be copied across but I’ve not had a look yet.
Yes, I’ve been using TFTP in u-boot for AVR32 to load the Linux Kernel for more than a year. My guess is that the AVR32 has direct Ethernet support so this was easier to support in u-boot. Given that BeagleBoard uses Ethernet via USB, it is a little more difficult to implement. Thanks for looking into this.
Kind Regards
John
I spent most of my time trying to get kexec to work… this would allow a really small linux kernel to boot, do the TFTP to download a new kernel and then boot it. It would also be a lot easier for people to tweak and modify (e.g. you want SFTP boot… sure… why not!) Sadly I’ve parked the kexec for the time being as I’ll need to take a look into the kernel source code and try and try and work out how to debug what’s going on…
I might take a look tomorrow at the latest U-Boot USB code (they have code for USB keyboard / storage device for example) and see what would be needed to either enable it for BeagleBoard or add some code to support the BeagleBoard’s USB controllers.
Mike
Hi John,
We have patches to U-boot to support DFU over USB from the host, which we use as part of our automated regression testing, but I don’t have the time to clean it up and push it upstream. If you are interested let me know.
Thanks,
Matthew Warton
Hi John,
We have patches to U-boot to support DFU over USB from the host, which we use as part of our automated regression testing, but I don’t have the time to clean it up and push it upstream. If you are interested let me know.
Hi Matthew,
If it works and I don’t have to program SDCards, I’m will be very appreciative. My preference would be TFTP, but anything is better than programming SDCards.
Kind Regards,
John
Thanks,
Matthew Warton
Hi John,
We have patches to U-boot to support DFU over USB from the host, which we use as part of our automated regression testing, but I don’t have the time to clean it up and push it upstream. If you are interested let me know.
Thinking about this, I can also do this with a JTAG emulator. I’ve been working with TI and Ronetix to get their emulators working with the BeagleBoard. Both companies have made significant progress over the last month and will be releasing code shortly that supports Linux Kernel level debugging on the BeagleBoard. I have used both and I will describe my impressions in a separate posting as this is getting off topic.
Anyway, I believe I can program NAND Flash with either emulator, but I would like to see if were possible to program SDRAM as this should be much faster.
Thanks,
Matthew Warton