So I've decided to write this little guide because of how much I've suffered +to get this to work, and how absolutely broken the MACCHAITObin documentation +is. Actually, just their website in general is broken. Marvell, please get your +act together with your website. It's not as if you're modifying it all that +often, so stop breaking things.
+ +With that out of the way, let's get to business.
+ +Aside from the MACCHIATObin itself (which I believe should be fairly +obvious), you're also going to want the following:
+ +It's very possible you'll run into issues later when installing UEFI onto the +SPI, so it's good to have an SD card that you can boot from, so as to have +access to a prompt. For this, I suggest going through the entire U-Boot install +instructions provided by ArchLinuxARM.[1] I also +suggest paying attention to the DIP switch or jumper settings, and pay attention +to which are for SD card and SPI boot. This should appear on the board, and in +the ArchLinuxARM documentation it shows the settings for SD card boot, but I'll +repeat both here:
+ +| + | Switches/Jumpers | +|||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Boot Type | +1 | +2 | +3 | +4 | +5 | +6 | +
| SD Card | +OFF | +ON | +ON | +ON | +OFF | +ON | +
| SPI | +OFF | +OFF | +OFF | +ON | +ON | +OFF | +
Use this as a guide for whenever I refer to booting from SD card or from the +SPI.
+ +The documentation for this can properly be found on the Solid Run Developer +Center[2], but I'll be repeating here, mostly +because I've had issues with a few of the options.
+ +Firstly, regarding the different options for obtaining a flash image, I'll
+just say that I've tried the docker image, and I've tried compiling natively on
+the MACCHIATObin, but both of these ran into issues. The docker image ran into a
+syntax error[3] and the native build had some
+issues when running Python tests, namely with
+codec.lookup('ucs-2'), saying it couldn't find the codec.
+Ultimately both errors are Python problems. Coincidence? I think not! But I'll
+forget about my disliking of Python for now and get on with this guide.
So really, the best option is to use the pre-built binary, which is SPI
+specific.[4] Once you have this, you're gonna want
+to save it to the USB storage device using a FAT32 formatted partition. If
+you're reading this sort of guide you should already know how to format a USB
+storage device, but I'll remind you that you don't only have to format the
+partition with mkfs.vfat -F 32 <partition>, but you actually
+also have to set the partition type to FAT32. I say this because I forgot to do
+this, and waste some time on it.
Once you have this done, copy the image binary onto the newly formatted
+storage device. You can either keep the name of uefi-mcbin-spi.bin
+or you can change it to flash-image.bin, which is the filename used
+in the Solid Run documentation for flashing to SPI from U-Boot. Your choice,
+just make sure to take it into consideration. I'll use
+uefi-mcbin-spi.bin since that's what I used anyways.
Now that this is done, it's time to flash the image to the SPI. To do this, +insert the USB storage device into the USB 3.0 slot on the MACCHIATObin, and +insert the SD card with ArchLinuxARM (and U-Boot) into the SD card slot. Set the +jumpers to boot from the SD card. Connect to the MACCHIATObin via serial USB. +Finally, boot the machine and make sure to interrupt the boot process (when +prompted) to enter the U-Boot console. From here, we'll be running the +instructions for installing an image to the SPI Flash via U-Boot found in the +documentation,[5] modifying, of course, for the +filename:
+ +To test to see if this has worked, turn off the MACCHIATObin, switch the +jumpers to boot from SPI, and check to see if you get a UEFI prompt. This should +appear not only if you start up in a serial console, but also on a screen if you +have everything hooked up with the graphics card. If you do see a prompt, then +all has worked as expected. If you don't, try doing this process a few more +times. It gave me some weird errors the first few times I tried, and then +magically it started working after what must've been the third time.
+ +