On Wed, Jun 8, 2011 at 9:31 AM, Chris Jones <chris@martin-jones.com> wrote:
> On 08/06/2011 14:43, Patrick Doyle wrote:
>> I think I'll go down the path of enabling access to the FPGA partition
>> of the NOR flash... at least until the "too hard" LED turns on.  Then
>> I'll start looking at the bbl path recommended by Wookey.  I'm
>> avoiding the bbl path right now because my USB<->RS232 converter only
>> works natively on my MacBook, and I deemed it more difficult (and less
>> fun) to figure out how to make bbl run on the MacBook, than it would
>> be to go hack kernel code.
>
> Don't worry too much about bbl. Clever and useful though it is, it's a
> wrapper round existing procedures using the serial port and JTAG ports
> mostly. My world suffers from sufficient dependency rot that I often
> find it easier to work with the bare metal - see below.
>
> My favourite ways of programming the NOR Flash:
> - serial into the bootldr with 'load flash 0x.....' and an XMODEM
> transfer. Pretty slow at 115kbaud but simple and reliable.
> - if the wind's blowing in the right direction, OpenOCD to talk to the
> JTAG port on the Balloon and program the NOR Flash that way. Quicker,
> capable of 20kbytes/sec or more, but requires more complex hardware and
> software.
>
> Both of these should work without too much grief on the Mac. I've used
> them both, though I've found USB-serial adapters on my Mac to be less
> than perfect.
>
I have been using ZMODEM fine.  But now that I have my spiffy PPP
network connection set up, I think I'll try NOR mtdblock thing.

I do have a USB based JTAG pod, but I feel kinda funny programming a
Xilinx part with an Altera Byte Blaster :-)

Plus, I don't have the breakout board with the JTAG header anyway.

--wpd