Hi,

On Monday, November 15, 2021 at 6:26:09 PM UTC-5, bob prohaska wrote:

Is there a readable guide to configuring u-boot so it can
find usb hard disks during boot of a raspberry pi 3b+ ?

Below is a sample of a recent boot attempt, using a serial
console. The hair-puller is the scan for usb storage devices
following usb reset. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
I've tinkered with setting delays in config.txt and with
usb_pgood_delay being between .1 and 40000, understood to be
in milliseconds.

Thank you for this, setting usb_pgood_delay=4000 helped my Pi find it's USB storage and let me boot from it.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)

Steve Wills <steve.wills@gmail.com> wrote:

Thank you for this, setting usb_pgood_delay=4000 helped my Pi find it's USB storage and let me boot from it.

Very glad it helped! The idea came from a correspondent on the
freebsd-arm mailing list, not my own insights...8-(

There still remains need for a readable u-boot manual. I have
figured out that even if a Pi (3 in this case) has no microSD
card and still managed to find and start u-boot on a USB device
it's unable to save environment variable to the USB device, it
still wants to write the change to microSD.

Perhaps recompiling u-boot with appropriate options will either
make the location of uboot.env selectable, or maybe there's a
more clever trick. If anybody knows please make a noise.....

bob prohaska

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)

On Sunday, March 6, 2022 at 12:43:24 PM UTC-5, bob prohaska wrote:

Very glad it helped! The idea came from a correspondent on the
freebsd-arm mailing list, not my own insights...8-(

There still remains need for a readable u-boot manual. I have
figured out that even if a Pi (3 in this case) has no microSD
card and still managed to find and start u-boot on a USB device
it's unable to save environment variable to the USB device, it
still wants to write the change to microSD.

Perhaps recompiling u-boot with appropriate options will either
make the location of uboot.env selectable, or maybe there's a
more clever trick. If anybody knows please make a noise.....

These lines in /usr/ports/sysutils/u-boot-rpi3/files/rpi3_fragment:

CONFIG_OF_EMBED=n
CONFIG_OF_BOARD=y
CONFIG_CMD_BMP=y
CONFIG_ENV_IS_IN_FAT=y
CONFIG_ENV_FAT_INTERFACE="usb"
CONFIG_ENV_FAT_DEVICE_AND_PART="0:1"
CONFIG_ENV_FAT_FILE="uboot.env"
CONFIG_RPI_EFI_NR_SPIN_PAGES=2
CONFIG_PREBOOT="setenv usb_pgood_delay 4000; usb start"

seem to produce a u-boot which will delay by default and *save* it's environment to the fat on usb, but it still doesn't *load* those. Still trying to figure that out. This commit seems to have added a way to delay loading the environment:

https://github.com/u-boot/u-boot/commit/06fd853890f23491605bfd6c9ab0116b79e15aaa

but I'm not sure how to trigger it after the (properly delayed) usb start finishes.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)