00:03 <_49616e> Hello everyone. I'm looking for a way to test the mainline amlogic u-boot binaries (I want to boot kernel images with EFI stubs), but so far I can't figure out a way to use the u-boot binary.

00:05 <_49616e> The device is a TV box shipped with amlogic's vintage u-boot on its emmc, and I don't want to erase it until I have a way to restore it with the usb burning tool from amlogic.

00:06 <_49616e> Chainloading the newer u-boot binary doesn't seem to work (loading the binary to RAM and then use `go 0xAddress`).

00:07 <_49616e> Is there a way to craft an image containing the bootloader that the Amlogic usb burning tool will accept?

03:06 <hexdump0815> i think your best option to play around with u-boot is to build an amlogic hdmi boot dongle like this: https://github.com/superna9999/linux/wiki/Amlogic-HDMI-Boot-Dongle

03:07 <hexdump0815> the amlogic soc by default boot from emmc if it is bootable and with this dongle you may force them to boot from usb or sd card instead making it way easier and less risky to play around with u-boot

03:09 <hexdump0815> i built one and it seem to work as expected - if you plan to build one, then please also check out this irc of the last days from now for some more information, which is not yet in the above wiki page (just search the irc for hexdump0815 and xdarklight should bring up those topics)

03:13 <hexdump0815> why is chainloading u-boot not working for you? what kind of errors are you getting? for me it works pretty reliable - you should use the u-boot.bin created by the mainline u-boot build process, the libretech-cc one worked very well for me for gxl boards

03:14 <hexdump0815> and you need to use the proper go address - for me "fatload usb 0 0x01000000 u-boot.bin" and "go 0x01000000" worked well ... good luck

03:16 <_49616e> I'm getting a "Synchronous Abort" error and then the board resets itself.

03:17 <_49616e> Thanks for all the info, I didn't know about the HDMI eeprom trick, and I didn't load the binary to 0x01000000 either.

03:18 <_49616e> I'll read the backlog and try building an HDMI dongle first. gitlab.denx.de is down at the moment, so I can't clone the source code to do a fresh build right now.