Possible setups for hacking on mainline

Booting kernels quickly

If hacking on the kernel we are interested in booting it as fast as possible. Also it's desirable to be able to boot legacy kernel (sunxi-3.4) and mainline with the same U-Boot. Writing kernels to an SD card is not an option, since SD card and/or slot can easily wear out. Instead you can setup network boot. First please read How to boot the A10 over the network, then armed with general knowledge adapt the following recipe. It is assumed the network is already configured in U-Boot.

• Mainline kernel

tftp 0x46000000 ml/uImage
tftp 0x49000000 ml/sun4i-a10-a1000.dtb
env set fdt_high ffffffff
bootm 0x46000000 - 0x49000000

• Legacy kernel

tftp 0x43000000 aw/script.bin
tftp 0x48000000 aw/uImage
bootm 0x48000000

Note, you can set up a shortcut for all of the commands above, for example a shortcut for mainline

setenv ml "tftp 0x46000000 ml/uImage && tftp 0x49000000 ml/sun4i-a10-a1000.dtb && env set fdt_high ffffffff && bootm 0x46000000 - 0x49000000"

and then just run

run ml

You can set another useful environment variables:

setenv autoload no
setenv bootdelay -1

Last but not least, save your environment with

saveenv

uEnv.txt example

autoload=no
ethaddr=12:34:56:78:99:aa
fdt_high=ffffffff
serverip=192.168.1.130
bootargs=earlyprintk console=ttyS0,115200
boot_tftp=dhcp; tftp 0x46000000 arch/arm/boot/uImage; tftp 0x49000000 arch/arm/boot/dts/sun7i-a20-cubieboard2.dtb; bootm 0x46000000 - 0x49000000 
uenvcmd=run boot_tftp