On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 9:12 AM, David Bisset
<david_bisset@btconnect.com> wrote:
> I feel sure I must be missing the point given the complexity of the discussion to date.
> But my approach would be to punt the MMU page out of the way since it maps 0 into RAM from early in the Bootloader process.
> Then just talk directly to the NOR chip. There are a number of code blocks out there you could copy the NOR writing code from.
> Why try and make it a real NOR partition when it isn't formatted as a FS, its just a fixed sequence of blocks in a memory device holding a fixed sequence of binary data.

I hadn't thought of that...I just started down the mtd path and never
thought to look left or right.

>  You're only going to do this for Balloon 3 so there is no pressure to be generic.

And it would appear that I'm only doing this for myself (i.e. nobody
else has a desire/need to reprogram the FPGA from user space), so I'm
most likely to go down the path of option 1 (and just adjust linuxargs
to deal with the change in partition numbering).

> The tough bit would be trying to program the FPGA live from user space...

I figured that once I exposed the FPGA partition as /dev/mtdblockN, I
would just dd my FPGA image into that block.

If my latest idea doesn't work, I'll start thinking along these lines.

Thanks for the tip.

--wpd