nanoboot

A bootloader for the FriendlyARM NanoPi (and Mini2451 in SD boot mode)

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This bootloader supports booting a kernel with an optional initrd from the FAT partition of a SD/MicroSD card. Device tree support is in the planning stages.

To build, set your CROSS_COMPILE environment variable to your toolchain's prefix. Mine is arm-buildroot-linux-gnueabi- but yours may be different. You'll also want to make sure your toolchain is in your PATH. Then just run make.

Installation is simple, just use the fuse script:

./fuse.sh /dev/sdX

where /dev/sdX is the device your sd card is on. It will automatically detect if your card is SD or SDHC automatically. If you have a 4GB non-SDHC card, you'll need to pass a 2nd argument, sd to the script.

nanoboot.txt

nanoboot.txt is an optional text you can create within the root of the FAT filesystem, which has a simple syntax allowing you to set various boot options:

• mini2451 - set Mini2451 device type (128 MB memory)
• nanopi - (default) set NanoPi device type (64 MB memory)
• quiet - don't produce any messages except for errors
• cmdline = ... - set the kernel command line
  • default is console=ttySAC0,115200 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootfstype=ext4 rootwait
• cmdline += ... - append to the kernel command line
• kernel = ... - set the kernel filename
  • default is zImage
• kernel_address = ... - set the kernel load address
  • default is 0x30008000
• initramfs = ... - set the initramfs file
  • default is blank, meaning no initramfs
• initramfs_address = ... - set the initramfs load address
  • default is 0x33000000