Using FS-Boot

FS-Boot was designed to run on a small memory foot print. Hence, the user interface to this program has been kept to the bare minimium, providing only necessary information on the serial console.

This section provides the user with information related to using FS-Boot.

Booting FS-Boot

FS-Boot bootloader is embedded within the hardware design bitstream. Hence, there is no special procedures to start FS-Boot. FS-Boot is automatically started by simply downloading the bitstreams on to the target FPGA.

FS-Boot can be booted using the following procedures.

Setup target platform for bitstream download.

Set up the target platform for bitstream download as per the target platform User Guide.

Start a kermit console

Set up and start the kermit console as per the Setting Up Kermit? section. This is to enable the host machine to communicate with FS-Boot via the serial port.

Download the hardware bitstreams

On a different console to the kermit terminal, change into the hardware project directory and type the following command.

$ make -f system.make download 

Note: There may be other user specific procedures that can be used to download the bitstreams. Use the procedures that are best suited for your development environment.

The FS-Boot banner appears

Upon starting up, FS-Boot will run a small routine to set up the target platform. After which it will print the FS-Boot banner.

The following FS-Boot banner or similar should appear on the kermit console.

=================================================
FS-BOOT First Stage Bootloader (c) 2006 PetaLogix
=================================================
FS-BOOT: System initialisation completed.
FS-BOOT: Booting from FLASH. Press 's' for image download.

At this stage FS-Boot will start counting down the number of seconds before it starts to boot the default U-Boot bootloader partition in FLASH. This is to allow the user to optionally start the SREC image download facility in FS-Boot.

This boot delay is set by the CONFIG_FS_BOOT_DELAY parameter. Refer to Customizing FS-boot for more information on configuring FS-Boot.

Start FS-Boot SREC image download

On a new platform there will not be any valid U-Boot image in FLASH. Hence, it is required to download the U-Boot image straight into RAM memory to start the platform initialisation procedure?.

FS-Boot will wait for some preconfigured amount of seconds before it will start the auto boot process. Ensure, that the 's' key is pressed before that.

Type 's' on the kermit console window to start the serial SREC download of U-Boot SREC image. The following FS-BOOT message should appear.

FS-BOOT: Waiting for SREC image....

Send the U-Boot SREC image

At this stage FS-Boot is ready to receive the U-Boot SREC image.

On a different console to the kermit window, type the following command to send the U-Boot SREC file to FS-BOOT.

$ cat /tftpboot/u-boot.srec > /dev/ttyS0

Note: The above example assumes that /dev/ttyS0 is used, substitude as per appropriate.

On the kermit window, you should see the "Spining wheel" symbol when it is downloading the SREC image.

Once the image download is completed, FS-Boot will print the "Image download successful" string or report any error if unsuccessful.

If successful, FS-Boot will wait the predefined amount of seconds before it starts to boot the newly downloaded image. This is to provide the user an option to revert to booting the default image in FLASH.

Booting Image

Once FS-Boot has decided on the image location that it will be booting from, it will start to boot the bootloader image.

Upon booting the following messages or similar should appear on the kermit window.

FS-BOOT: Waiting for SREC image....
FS-BOOT: Image download successful.
FS-BOOT: Warning image location differ from default boot location. Image will not boot automatically after POR.
FS-BOOT: Press 'n' to boot old image.
FS-BOOT: Use new image.
FS-BOOT: Booting image...
SDRAM :
        U-Boot Start:0x13fc0000
        Malloc Start:0x13f60000
        Board Info Start:0x13f5ffd0
        Boot Parameters Start:0x13f4ffd0
FLASH:  8 MB
ETHERNET: MAC:<NULL>

*** Warning - bad CRC, using default environment

U-Boot>

Note: The above example shows the boot log of a unconfigured target platform. These warning message will not appear once the platform initialisation is done.