From: Ahmad Fatoum <a.fatoum@pengutronix.de>
To: barebox@lists.infradead.org, mgr@pengutronix.de, ore@pengutronix.de
Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/3] ARM: at91: mmc-xload: allow overriding card capacity
Date: Thu, 3 Jun 2021 09:01:51 +0200 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <c0505bb2-0b3c-168e-2aa6-6a2106a1c0c3@pengutronix.de> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <YLh8bEaYMgFd97N6@ada-deb-carambola.ifak-system.com>
Hello Alex,
On 03.06.21 08:53, Alexander Dahl wrote:
> thanks for the surprisingly detailed explanation.
:-)
> Am Thu, Jun 03, 2021 at 08:28:48AM +0200 schrieb Ahmad Fatoum:
>> On 03.06.21 07:34, Alexander Dahl wrote:
>>> Am Wed, Jun 02, 2021 at 12:25:23PM +0200 schrieb Ahmad Fatoum:
>>>> The PBL MMC driver works with the assumption that the BootROM has left
>>>> the SD-Card in transfer mode. There seems to be no definitive way
>>>> to find out whether a running card is high capacity (> 2G) or not,
>>>> but we need this info when reading, because default capacities accept
>>>> their read offset in bytes while high capacity deal in 512 byte blocks.
>>>
>>> I'm a little surprised there's not. Once like ten years ago I had to
>>> write a SD card driver for a small microcontroller. In the firmware I
>>> switched to high capacity mode just based on the Card Capacity Status
>>> (CCS) bit in the Operation Conditions Register (OCR) of the SD card.
>>> Got that after sending advanced command 41 (send op cond) to the card.
>>
>> barebox proper does that in sd_send_op_cond() as well.
>>
>>> Not sure if it's that easy, or if that command was only sent under
>>> certain conditions, but I can not remember just guessing high capacity
>>> based on some heuristics nor hard code it.
>>
>> When you build at91_multi_defconfig, multiple images are generated, currently:
>>
>> barebox-at91sam9x5ek.img
>> barebox-at91sam9263ek.img
>> barebox-microchip-ksz9477-evb.img
>> barebox-microchip-ksz9477-evb-xload-mmc.img
>> barebox-sama5d27-som1-ek.img
>> barebox-sama5d27-som1-ek-xload-mmc.img
>> barebox-groboards-sama5d27-giantboard.img
>> barebox-groboards-sama5d27-giantboard-xload-mmc.img
>> barebox-skov-arm9cpu.img
>>
>> This patch here is for the xload-mmc.img's, which result from the barebox
>> prebootloader. The PBL sets up SDRAM and chainloads barebox proper from the
>> same boot medium that itself came from. Because of this limited scope, it can
>> reuse here the SD-card setup done by the BootROM. The BootROM leaves the
>> SD-Card in transfer mode, allowing the PBL to directly read blocks off the
>> SD-Card without a full MMC/SD-Card driver.
>
> I see.
>
>>> We certainly used low
>>> capacity (like 32 MB for example) and high capacity cards (4G or more)
>>> with that system.
>>>
>>> You probably already looked for a reliable way to detect this. I was
>>> just curious why this needs to be hardcoded.
>>
>> It's been a while since I wrote the sama5d27 PBL support (which the
>> sama5d3 support I am patching here is based on), but I recall that
>> the send op cond did not work in transfer mode, the card must be sent
>> into idle first, i.e. reset. I'd be happy if there happens to be indeed
>> a way to deduce high capacity mode without resetting and having to repeat
>> the SD-Card setup in the first boot stage.
>
> Makes sense. And yes, IIRC correctly, that register read happens
> while setting up the card. If you can not or don't want to reset the
> card again, it's probably tricky.
>
>> There are of course alternatives to this:
>> - build barebox twice with different configs for first and second stage:
>> There is already code for this (chainload code that uses barebox proper
>> driver that fully re-initializes card). The first stage config needs to
>> be small to fit into SRAM, so we can no longer generate both stages from
>> the same multi-image config as we already do.
>>
>> - provide full MMC support in PBL:
>> The objective so far was to keep PBL code to the bare minimum. Doing
>> full MMC setup there violates that.
>>
>>
>> AFAIK, all barebox platforms, except for i.MX, went for the first alternative
>> of having multiple configs. barebox on i.MX doesn't have this issue, because
>> it reads barebox from offset 0 of the SD/MMC, which works equally well whether
>> booting off default or high capacity cards.
>>
>> I like how the i.MX defconfig generates more than a hundred images in one go and
>> wanted AT91 to have something similar, but the fact that FAT needs to seek around
>> (offsets != 0) complicates this.
>> The trade off I took then was assuming high capacity cards and postpone the decision
>> on how to deal with default capacity cards in PBL into the future.
>
> I just had the idea of just trying to read from different small
> offsets and compare it with the block you get from offset 0. For
> example reading 500 bytes from offset 10 and reading 510 bytes from
> offset 0 in byte mode should match the last 500 bytes, but probably in
> block mode that wouldn't match. But that's obviously highly dependent
> on the card content and more an ugly hack, right?
Tested that yesterday: reading from the 2G default capacity card at offset 1
caused a hang. So any heuristic will probably need to read 512-byte aligned
blocks.
Cheers,
Ahmad
>
> Greets
> Alex
>
>
--
Pengutronix e.K. | |
Steuerwalder Str. 21 | http://www.pengutronix.de/ |
31137 Hildesheim, Germany | Phone: +49-5121-206917-0 |
Amtsgericht Hildesheim, HRA 2686 | Fax: +49-5121-206917-5555 |
_______________________________________________
barebox mailing list
barebox@lists.infradead.org
http://lists.infradead.org/mailman/listinfo/barebox
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2021-06-03 7:03 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 9+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2021-06-02 10:25 [PATCH 1/3] ARM: at91: microchip-ksz9477-evb: support PBL console Ahmad Fatoum
2021-06-02 10:25 ` [PATCH 2/3] ARM: at91: mmc-xload: allow overriding card capacity Ahmad Fatoum
2021-06-02 10:30 ` Ahmad Fatoum
2021-06-03 5:34 ` Alexander Dahl
2021-06-03 6:28 ` Ahmad Fatoum
2021-06-03 6:53 ` Alexander Dahl
2021-06-03 7:01 ` Ahmad Fatoum [this message]
2021-06-02 10:25 ` [PATCH 3/3] ARM: at91: xload-mmc: add prominent note about PBL MMC limitation Ahmad Fatoum
2021-06-02 10:29 ` [PATCH 1/3] ARM: at91: microchip-ksz9477-evb: support PBL console Ahmad Fatoum
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=c0505bb2-0b3c-168e-2aa6-6a2106a1c0c3@pengutronix.de \
--to=a.fatoum@pengutronix.de \
--cc=barebox@lists.infradead.org \
--cc=mgr@pengutronix.de \
--cc=ore@pengutronix.de \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox