--- /dev/null
+Allwinner NAND flashing
+=======================
+
+A lot of Allwinner devices, especially the older ones (pre-H3 era),
+comes with a NAND. NANDs storages are a pretty weak choice when it
+comes to the reliability, and it comes with a number of flaws like
+read and write disturbs, data retention issues, bloks becoming
+unusable, etc.
+
+In order to mitigate that, various strategies have been found to be
+able to recover from those issues like ECC, hardware randomization,
+and of course, redundancy for the critical parts.
+
+This is obviously something that we will take into account when
+creating our images. However, the BROM will use a quite weird pattern
+when accessing the NAND, and will access only at most 4kB per page,
+which means that we also have to split that binary accross several
+pages.
+
+In order to accomodate that, we create a tool that will generate an
+SPL image that is ready to be programmed directly embedding the ECCs,
+randomized, and with the necessary bits needed to reduce the number of
+bitflips. The U-Boot build system, when configured for the NAND will
+also generate the image sunxi-spl-with-ecc.bin that will have been
+generated by that tool.
+
+In order to flash your U-Boot image onto a board, assuming that the
+board is in FEL mode, you'll need the sunxi-tools that you can find at
+this repository: https://github.com/linux-sunxi/sunxi-tools
+
+Then, you'll need to first load an SPL to initialise the RAM:
+sunxi-fel spl spl/sunxi-spl.bin
+
+Load the binaries we'll flash into RAM:
+sunxi-fel write 0x4a000000 u-boot-dtb.bin
+sunxi-fel write 0x43000000 spl/sunxi-spl-with-ecc.bin
+
+And execute U-Boot
+sunxi-fel exe 0x4a000000
+
+On your board, you'll now have all the needed binaries into RAM, so
+you only need to erase the NAND...
+
+nand erase.chip
+
+Then write the SPL and its backup:
+
+nand write.raw.noverify 0x43000000 0 40
+nand write.raw.noverify 0x43000000 0x400000 40
+
+And finally write the U-Boot binary:
+nand write 0x4a000000 0x800000 0xc0000
+
+You can now reboot and enjoy your NAND.
\ No newline at end of file
ifdef CONFIG_ARCH_SUNXI
ALL-y += $(obj)/sunxi-spl.bin
+
+ifdef CONFIG_NAND_SUNXI
+ALL-y += $(obj)/sunxi-spl-with-ecc.bin
+endif
endif
ifeq ($(CONFIG_SYS_SOC),"at91")
$(obj)/sunxi-spl.bin: $(obj)/$(SPL_BIN).bin FORCE
$(call if_changed,mksunxiboot)
+quiet_cmd_sunxi_spl_image_builder = SUNXI_SPL_IMAGE_BUILDER $@
+cmd_sunxi_spl_image_builder = $(objtree)/tools/sunxi-spl-image-builder \
+ -c $(CONFIG_NAND_SUNXI_SPL_ECC_STRENGTH)/$(CONFIG_NAND_SUNXI_SPL_ECC_SIZE) \
+ -p $(CONFIG_SYS_NAND_PAGE_SIZE) \
+ -o $(CONFIG_SYS_NAND_OOBSIZE) \
+ -u $(CONFIG_NAND_SUNXI_SPL_USABLE_PAGE_SIZE) \
+ -e $(CONFIG_SYS_NAND_BLOCK_SIZE) \
+ -s -b $< $@
+$(obj)/sunxi-spl-with-ecc.bin: $(obj)/sunxi-spl.bin
+ $(call if_changed,sunxi_spl_image_builder)
+
# Rule to link u-boot-spl
# May be overridden by arch/$(ARCH)/config.mk
quiet_cmd_u-boot-spl ?= LD $@