I bought SheevaPlug in the hope of running a nice low power server for personal needs, so it is my 1st exposure to ARM device.
I use FreeBSD on Intel machine, but arm is Tier2 support, so I decided to give NetBSD a try. Unfortunately I am completely confused by the installation procedure. The instructions are focused on TFTP server, but I am trying to use USB stick formatted with FAT 16.
I am just trying to boot into NetBSD without installing it on SDHC card.
I don't know if it is the best way to go.
I don't know which file I need to copy onto FAT16, so I copied 2 files:
gzcat /Volumes/NETBSD_614/EVBARM/BINARY/KERNEL/NETBSD_IQ80321.BIN_GZ > NETBSD_IQ80321.BIN
gzcat /Volumes/NETBSD_614/EVBARM/BINARY/KERNEL/NETBSD_IQ80321.GZ > NETBSD_IQ80321
I then tried loading both files and failed.
On Boot:
U-Boot 2011.12 (Mar 11 2012 - 18:59:46)
Marvell-Sheevaplug - eSATA - SD/MMC
SoC: Kirkwood 88F6281_A1
DRAM: 512 MiB
WARNING: Caches not enabled
NAND: 512 MiB
In: serial
Out: serial
Err: serial
Net: egiga0
88E1116 Initialized on egiga0
Hit any key to stop autoboot: 0
No MMC card found
** Bad partition 1 **
** Bad partition 1 **
Wrong Image Format for bootm command
ERROR: can't get kernel image!
The autoload errors are coming from missing SDHC card with Debian Linux on it.
I then try loading what I think kernel files are and the system hangs. I am sure I just don't do it right.
Marvell>> fatls usb 0
4096 ._.trashes
.trashes/
.spotlight-v100/
4649600 netbsd_sheevaplug.bin
5148787 netbsd_sheevaplug
3 file(s), 2 dir(s)
Marvell>> fatload usb 0 0x900000 netbsd_sheevaplug
reading netbsd_sheevaplug
5148787 bytes read
Marvell>> go 0x900000
## Starting application at 0x00900000 ...
And that's when it hangs. I see nothing, so I pull the plug and try again.
The installation document references memory 0x60660000. If that's the case, then I don't know which memory address to load into. I use 0x900000, because it works with Linux kernel, which is probably not right.
Several months ago I compiled custom FreeBSD image, and was able to boot it (don't remember much about it). Unfortunately, I found that I could not boot FreeBSD from SDHC and abandoned that route. I hope NetBSD is better in that respect.
thank you