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ASoko19's avatar
ASoko19
Icon for New Contributor rankNew Contributor
5 years ago

Make script doesn't generate Preloader image for DE0-Nano board

Hi, everyone.

I'm working on booting up Linux on DE0-Nano board.

I've successfully created a HPS design, got FPGA programming file and generated a bsp settings file.

But when I try to make the preloader image with make command it tells me to visit the rocketboards site:

Please visit https://rocketboards.org/foswiki/Documentation/BuildingBootloader for instructions on how to build the bootloader.

But on this site there is no information about how to compile preloader image, only the bootloader image.

So what should I do to get the preloader image?

BR,

Artem Sokolov

3 Replies

  • FawazJ_Altera's avatar
    FawazJ_Altera
    Icon for Frequent Contributor rankFrequent Contributor
    5 years ago

    Hello.

    This is the new flow of generating the bootloader for SoC FPGA devices starting from Quartus Prime 19.1.

    This flow will generate the preloader and uboot together.

    thanks

  • ASoko19's avatar
    ASoko19
    Icon for New Contributor rankNew Contributor
    5 years ago

    Hello.

    Thanks for clarification. I created preloader image, burnt SD card with all necessary files, but I get nothing via UART in the terminal.

    So I have a few more questions in order to make sure I did all the steps right:

    1. As I understood bsp-editor needs u-boot.tar.gz file in order to make preloader. Is it right to just download altera u-boot git repo in tar.gz format and provide bsp-editor with this file?
    2. I copied u-boot-spl.bin file to a2 partition as preloader image. Is it a right file to copy?
    3. Are there any ways to make sure that preloader image is alright?

    BR,

    Artem Sokolov

  • JFrye2's avatar
    JFrye2
    Icon for New Contributor rankNew Contributor
    5 years ago

    You should abandon the idea of a separate preloader. It is now built into u-boot. You clone the altera-opensource/u-boot repo and point u-boot to the hardware-software handoff files and it will generate the preloader. The file you will be looking for after building u-boot is u-boot-with-spl.sfp. I am convinced there are bugs in their u-boot, but you should still be able to get the chip set up to run Linux. I suggest you take the time to read https://github.com/u-boot/u-boot/blob/master/doc/README.socfpga because it should clarify a lot of your confusion; it helped me a lot. I think you will want to use the socfpga_cyclone5_defconfig when building u-boot (that was the one I got to work; when I tried to use the one for my board, the DE1-SoC I got no console output which is kind of buggy). Clone the repo, point it to the Quartus project, configure it for socfpga_cyclone5_defconfig, and build. Put u-boot-with-spl.sfp on the A2 partition and you should be golden.