nanoboot

A bootloader for the FriendlyARM NanoPi (and Mini2451 in SD boot mode)

This bootloader supports booting a kernel with an optional initrd from the FAT partition of a SD/MicroSD card. Device tree support is in the planning stages.

To build, set your CROSS_COMPILE environment variable to your toolchain's prefix. Mine is arm-buildroot-linux-gnueabi- but yours may be different. You'll also want to make sure your toolchain is in your PATH. Then just run make.

Installation is simple, just use the fuse script:

./fuse.sh /dev/sdX

where /dev/sdX is the device your sd card is on. It will automatically detect if your card is SD or SDHC automatically. If you have a 4GB non-SDHC card, you'll need to pass a 2nd argument, sd to the script.

nanoboot.txt

nanoboot.txt is an optional text you can create within the root of the FAT filesystem, which has a simple syntax allowing you to set various boot options:

mini2451 - set Mini2451 device type (128 MB memory)
nanopi - (default) set NanoPi device type (64 MB memory)
quiet - don't produce any messages except for errors
cmdline = ... - set the kernel command line
- default is console=ttySAC0,115200 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootfstype=ext4 rootwait
cmdline += ... - append to the kernel command line
kernel = ... - set the kernel filename
- default is zImage
kernel_address = ... - set the kernel load address
- default is 0x30008000
initramfs = ... - set the initramfs file
- default is blank, meaning no initramfs
initramfs_address = ... - set the initramfs load address
- default is 0x33000000

ARMWorks/nanoboot

nanoboot

nanoboot.txt