[fedora-arm] Banana Pi R1 on fedora 21 - uboot update

[mo.ucina]

Hello Guys,

Since I installed Fedora 21 on my R1 board , some development has 
happened on the u-boot side of things for the banana-pi . So I decided 
to upgrade the u-boot in my production board . At first I was not sure 
if the update would bork the partition table , but after the help from 
Peter R. , decided to take the plunge . Procedure I followed is as per :

- Download uboot-tools-2015.04-3.fc23 from fedora koji and compile for fc21
- this creates two files: uboot-images and uboot-tools
- Upgraded the system with these two new files : 
uboot-images-armv7-2015.04-3.fc21.noarch and 
uboot-tools-2015.04-3.fc21.armv7hl
- Now the most critical part , writing the bananapi image into the 
sdcard , using command :
    dd if=/usr/share/uboot/Bananapi/u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin 
of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1024 seek=8; sync
- Reboot the board

The new uboot is now running happily , here is the printout of the version :

root at bananapi /home/user # strings /dev/mmcblk0 | grep U-Boot
U-Boot
U-Boot SPL 2015.04 (Jun 17 2015 - 19:28:40)
U-Boot 2015.04 for sunxi board

The process did indeed go very painlessly . I am hoping that there will 
be an update to the uboot soon specifically for the R1. This is because 
it has been observed that the GMAC_TX_DELAY is not optimally set on the 
R1 as it is a copy/paste form the regular bananapi setting . However due 
to its different layout the R1 should have a different setting , and as 
a result some users have observed inadequate throughput . In my case 
throughput is adequate at the moment since I am on ADSL ,  but come NBN 
things may change .

Best Regards
Milorad



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