kirkwood

• Boards based on the Marvell MV88F61xx/MV88F62xx SoCs

• Working

• Latest git commits for this target
• Link to Image builders for each target/subtarget

These Marvel units with Kirkwood platform (maybe Orion, too?) are almost undestroyable. Even if you manage to kill the uBoot loader (deleting in OS the mtd or similar) you can (almost) always recover and flash a working uBoot. There is a tool called kwboot, delivered with most of your favorite Linux distros (bare metal, USB booted or VM install).

• Unordered List ItemInstall the latest kwboot version your distro delivers.
• Attach a usb serial to ttl converter to the board and your pc. For the serial pinout refer to your devices OpenWRT wiki page!
• Download a working uBoot in the .kwb format exactly matching your device. OpenWRT uBoot images are not always reliable to work. A very good source and support can be gained at the Doozan Forums. But refer to the units OpenWRT wiki page for more uBoot info first!
• Turn of the Kirkwood unit and start the kwboot process with:

kwboot  -t -B 115200 /dev/ttyUSB00 -b u-boot.kwb -p

• Unordered List ItemAdjust the usb device path and the .kwb name to your needs.
• Power up (maybe pushbuttton, too) the Kirkwood board.
• Flashing should start.
• After successfull transfer you have uBoot started from RAM.
• Interrupt the start process before the OS booting starts and get access to the bootloader shell.
• For a permanent recovery you need to write uBoot to flash.

Repeated the u-boot flashing process mentioned above.

often i start kwboot, the units fan spins to
max and just stitts there and nothing else happens.
not matter what kwboot i´m using

The solution for this is quiet easy: stop/cancel the kwboot process. Restart the kwboot process! Don´t powercycle the unit! Just try again.

These images support the following latest U-Boot features (among others):

• Both FDT and non-FDT kernel booting
• supports EFI/GPT partition > 2TB (SATA and USB) either for booting or just attached. NOTE: fixed the large HDD (> 2TB) issue in u-boot.
• boot Ext4 rootfs
• SNTP (Simple NTP to set date time during U-Boot booting)
• bootz (boot with zImage).
• Ability to customize u-boot envs in a script (uEnv.txt) during boot, without committing changes to NAND (see section C for instruction). This feature also can be used for rescue purpose where the u-boot envs were messed up, or when the NAND envs block is bad.

Doozan Forum uBoot