Compiling U-Boot with Device Tree Support for the Raspberry Pi

U-Boot

U-Boot (The Universal Bootloader) is a popular, feature rich, open source bootloader for embedded systems. It is licenced under the GNU General Public Licence version 2.

While its primary purpose is to boot an operating system, such as Linux, it also provides many useful tools for developing and debugging embedded systems.

This includes support for many common file-systems including FAT, ext3, ext4, NFS etc and interfaces such as USB, Ethernet (IP), MMC and even Asynchronous Serial (Kermit/xmodem/ymodem). This allows the developer to load new images and file-systems from a variety of sources for testing and/or reflashing.

It also includes an environment variable engine allowing for easy configuration.

Understanding the Raspberry Pi Boot Process

More traditional embedded systems contain on-board flash memory mapped at the reset vector. Upon reset, the CPU will start loading instructions beginning at the reset vector. In these systems, U-Boot is normally flashed into non-volatile memory at the reset vector. The on-board flash may also include an environment variable space, the Linux kernel and filesystem.

To reduce cost, the Raspberry Pi (with the exception of the compute module) omits any on-board non-volatile memory. Rather, a SD/MMC card slot is provided for this purpose. This also offers convenience – in some environments – as SD cards are not only cheap, but easy to swap out and upgrade.

The VideoCore GPU is responsible for booting the Broadcom BCM283x system on a chip (SoC), contained on the Raspberry Pi. The SoC will boot up with its main ARM processor held in reset.

The VideoCore GPU loads the first stage bootloader from a ROM embedded within the SoC. This extremely simple first stage bootloader is designed to load the second stage bootloader from a FAT32 or FAT16 filesystem located on the SD Card.

The second stage bootloader – bootcode.bin – is executed on the VideoCore GPU and loads the third stage bootloader – start.elf. Both these bootloaders are closed firmware, available as binary blobs from Broadcom.

The third stage bootloader – start.elf – is where all the action happens. It starts by reading config.txt, a text file containing configuration parameters for both the VideoCore (Video/HDMI modes, memory, console frame buffers etc) and the Linux Kernel (load addresses, device tree, UART/console baud rates etc).

Once the config.txt file has been parsed, the third stage bootloader will load cmdline.txt – a file containing the kernel command line parameters to be passed to the kernel and kernel.img – the Linux kernel.  Both are loaded into shared memory allocated to the ARM processor. Once complete, the third stage bootloader will release the ARM processor from reset. Your kernel should now start booting.

Hence, the Linux kernel can be booted without the need of U-Boot.  However, as indicated U-Boot provides many useful tools for developing and debugging embedded systems such as loading a newly compiled kernel via TFTP over the network for testing. This eliminates the slow and painful process of copying the Kernel to SD Card between each tweak and compilation.

Prerequisites

To compile the U-Boot bootloader for the Raspberry Pi, you must first have the GCC cross-compiler and device tree compiler installed.

Assuming Ubuntu 18.04 as your build system, install these prerequisites:

apt-get install gcc-arm-linux-gnueabi
apt-get install device-tree-compiler

Download U-Boot Source Code

Download and extract the latest mainline version of U-Boot:

wget ftp://ftp.denx.de/pub/u-boot/u-boot-2018.09.tar.bz2
tar -xjf u-boot-2018.09.tar.bz2 
cd u-boot-2018.09

Cross-Compiling

To cross compile U-Boot for your ARM processor, first clean the distribution:

make CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabi- distclean

Next, set the default configuration. This will vary depending upon the Raspberry Pi variant you wish to target:

Raspberry PI Variant	Processor	Configuration File
Raspberry PI Model A	BCM2835	rpi_defconfig
Raspberry PI Model A+	BCM2835	rpi_defconfig
Raspberry PI Model B+	BCM2835	rpi_defconfig
Raspberry PI Compute Module	BCM2835	rpi_defconfig
Raspberry PI Zero	BCM2835	rpi_defconfig
Raspberry PI Zero W	BCM2835	rpi_0_w_defconfig
Raspberry PI 2 Model B	BCM2836	rpi_2_defconfig
Raspberry PI 3 Model B	BCM2837	rpi_3_defconfig
Raspberry PI 3 Model B+	BCM2837B0	rpi_3_defconfig

For example, if we target the Raspberry PI Model B+, run:

make CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabi- rpi_defconfig

and finally compile U-Boot:

make CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabi- u-boot.bin

Once compiled, u-boot.bin can be copied to your SD Card.

Preparing a SD Card

The Raspberry Pi’s first stage bootloader will boot from either a FAT16 or FAT32 partition. First, partition the card using fdisk where /dev/sdb is your SD/MMC block device:

sudo fdisk /dev/sdb

You will now be presented with a menu. First select p (print the partition table) and ensure you have selected the right disk.

If the disk is correct, delete any existing partitions.

Now select n to add a new partition. Select primary partition and any other defaults.

The default partition will now be set for linux. Select t to change a partition’s system ID and enter b (W95 FAT32).

Finally, write the partition table to disk and exit by selecting w.

Now format the SD card:

sudo mkfs.vfat /dev/sdb1

And mount the new file system, so you can add the required files:

sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sdb1 /media/card

Copy the following files over to your freshly formatted SD/MMC card:

bootcode.bin
start.elf
config.txt
cmdline.txt
u-boot.bin

You can obtain bootcode.bin and start.elf from the Raspberry Pi Git Repository:

wget https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/raw/master/boot/bootcode.bin
wget https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/raw/master/boot/start.elf

Create the config.txt file and add the following line:

kernel=u-boot.bin

This will tell the third stage bootloader to load u-boot.bin rather than the Linux kernel, kernel.img.

Once you are finished configuring your SD Card, unmount the disk and insert it into your Raspberry Pi:

sudo umount /media/card

Console

When booting, the console is available using a HDMI display and USB keyboard, and via the UART (Pin 8:TXD, Pin 10:RXD) @ 115,200bps.