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U-Boot on Raspberry Pi (including RPi 4)

by Andrei Gherzan 2019-07-12 Reading time: 4 minutes

TL;DR

About

U-Boot, Das U-Boot, is a very common bootloader in embedded systems. It includes support for various computer architectures and, following this guide, you will be able to run it on your Raspberry Pi.

Toolchain

First of all you will need some tools, including a cross compiler, to be able to proceed with compiling this component. There are a set of options in this regards.

Download a toolchain

You can download one from various online providers. One example, probably the most common one, is Linaro. Download the right toolchain for your target. For example if you want to compile a U-Boot for a 32b Raspberry Pi, download the arm-linux-gnueabihf toolchain. Dearchive the file and set a variable so we can point the compilation to this toolchain:

tar -xf gcc-linaro-7.4.1-2019.02-x86_64_arm-linux-gnueabihf.tar.xz
export TOOLCHAIN="$(pwd)/gcc-linaro-7.4.1-2019.02-x86_64_arm-linux-gnueabihf/bin"

Compile your own toolchain

I wrote a braindump which includes instructions for doing this for a 64bit toolchain. See this for more information. You will need to tweak things around for a 32bit one but things should stay pretty similar. Using that guide or a similar one you should end up with a TOOLCHAIN variable definition for the bin directory of the toolchain.

Yocto

You can also let Yocto deal with this but that is not the target of this guide. In summary, all you need to do is setup a build with the appropriate MACHINE set. The Raspberry Pi machines are defined in meta-raspberrypi.

Compile U-Boot

We will be using version v2019.07 in this guide. Upstream has support for all the Raspberry Pi boards with the exception of Raspberry Pi 4 for which you will need to use a fork until support gets upstreamed. As the fork inherits the support for all the boards, we will be using it in the following commands.

git clone https://github.com/agherzan/u-boot.git u-boot
cd u-boot
git checkout ag/v2019.07-rpi4-wip

There is also a backport branch for v2019.01: ag/v2019.01-rpi4-wip.

We have the code, now we can proceed to compilation. We will be using different defconfigs based on the targeted board as it follows:

Also, you will need the name of the toolchain. This is the triplet of the tools available in the toolchain’s bin directory. For example if you toolchain includes the ar archiver as a file called arm-linux-gnueabihf-ar, the CROSS_COMPILE variable used by U-Boot compile process will be CROSS_COMPILE=$TOOLCHAIN/arm-linux-gnueabihf-. Make sure you adapt this variable below for other toolchains.

CROSS_COMPILE=$TOOLCHAIN/arm-linux-gnueabihf- make pick_the_right_defconfig
CROSS_COMPILE=$TOOLCHAIN/arm-linux-gnueabihf- make -j8

This is most probably obvious but it doesn’t hurt to be mentioned. The defconfig used above needs to match the toolchain and in turn the triplet used for CROSS_COMPILE variable. This will break if for example you are trying to build a rpi_3_32b_defconfig with a aarch64 toolchain.

To make the boot process automatic let’s compile a user-defined image file that will setup the bootcmd in U-Boot:

$ cat << EOF > boot.cmd
fdt addr \${fdt_addr} && fdt get value bootargs /chosen bootargs
fatload mmc 0:1 \${kernel_addr_r} uImage
bootm \${kernel_addr_r} - \${fdt_addr}
EOF
$ mkimage -A arm -T script -C none -n "Boot script" -d "boot.cmd" boot.scr

You will need mkimage available on your host. On Archlinux, for example, this tool is provided by uboot-tools. Have some research for your distro.

With that being done all we need now is to define a variable so we can reference it when deploying the compiled bits:

export UBOOT_BUILD_DIR="$(pwd)"

Run Raspbian with U-Boot

You now have all the required elements to proceed in modifying a Raspbian image to boot a Raspberry Pi board with U-Boot. First thing first, download Raspbian and burn it with any tool you prefer. I’d use etcher. Mount the boot partition and proceed with copying the compiled U-Boot and other changes. The following commands assume that the boot partition mount point is /run/media/me/boot. Also, the paths rely on the exports set throughout this braindump.

The Raspberry Pi bootloader selects a kernel image from the boot partition based on the board it boots:

Let’s define the one you are targeting so the next commands can simply use a variable:

export KERNEL=kernel7l.img

We need to convert this image into one that U-Boot can load with bootm (as we set the boot.cmd file):

mkimage -A arm -O linux -T kernel -C none -a 0x00008000 -e 0x00008000 -n "Linux kernel" -d /run/media/me/boot/$KERNEL /run/media/me/boot/uImage

All is left now is to copy U-boot, make a small config.txt change and umount:

cp $UBOOT_BUILD_DIR/u-boot.bin /run/media/me/boot/$KERNEL
cp $UBOOT_BUILD_DIR/boot.scr /run/media/me/boot
echo "enable_uart=1" >> /run/media/me/boot/config.txt
sync
umount /run/media/me/boot

The enable_uart setting is required because U-Boot assumes the VideoCore firmware is configured to use the mini UART (rather than PL011) for the serial console. Without this, U-Boot will not boot at all.

Pop the microSD card in your board, attach a serial console and boot:

MMC:   emmc2@7e340000: 0
Loading Environment from FAT... *** Warning - bad CRC, using default environment

In:    serial
Out:   serial
Err:   serial
Net:   No ethernet found.
starting USB...
Bus usb@7e980000: scanning bus usb@7e980000 for devices... 1 USB Device(s) found
       scanning usb for storage devices... 0 Storage Device(s) found
Hit any key to stop autoboot:  0 
switch to partitions #0, OK
mmc0 is current device
Scanning mmc 0:1...
Found U-Boot script /boot.scr
213 bytes read in 34 ms (5.9 KiB/s)
## Executing script at 02400000
5608976 bytes read in 1165 ms (4.6 MiB/s)
## Booting kernel from Legacy Image at 00080000 ...
   Image Name:   Linux kernel
   Image Type:   ARM Linux Kernel Image (uncompressed)
   Data Size:    5608912 Bytes = 5.3 MiB
   Load Address: 00008000
   Entry Point:  00008000
   Verifying Checksum ... OK
## Flattened Device Tree blob at 2eff6000
   Booting using the fdt blob at 0x2eff6000
   Loading Kernel Image ... OK
   Using Device Tree in place at 2eff6000, end 2f002f5a

Starting kernel ...
[...]

The output will be different depending on your board but not too much. The Raspberry Pi will load U-Boot which in turn will load and run the kernel and you will end up in Raspbian.