Introduction

I recently got my hands on a sheevaplug (SKU# RD-88F6281-BPLUG-A) thanks to my colleague Bill.

The sheevaplug is a small form factor computer sporting Marvell Feroceon ARM-based CPU,
this post describe how to upgrade u-boot, u-boot is the boot loader used by the sheevaplug.

Connect to the sheeva plug console

To connected to the sheevaplug console, plug in the sheevaplug USB cable to your workstation,
the sheevaplug console device (/dev/ttyUSB0) should show up, if not check that you have the usbserial and ftdi_sio modules loaded,
change the permission on the device and connect to it using GNU screen:


Press Enter a couple of times, you should see the following prompt:

Check the current u-boot version

Before starting the upgrade procedure connect to your sheevaplug console and check the current version,
who knows you might not need to upgrade:

Apparently we are not running the latest u-boot version here, so let's proceed with the upgrade,
there are two methods, one is to use a tftp server, the second one is to use a USB stick.

First method: tftp server

first, setup a tftp server (here on a fedora box) then download the latest u-boot (u-boot 3.4.5 + pingtoo patch 01)
and save it as /var/lib/tftpboot/uboot.bin:


Once your tftp server is setup connect the sheevaplug to your LAN and plug its USB console to your workstation,
then issue the commands below (set the serverip and ipaddr according to your LAN setup):

Second method: USB stick

To upgrade it using a USB stick, copy the uboot.bin on a FAT32 formatted USB stick and
issue the following commands from the sheevaplug console:

Marvell>> usb start
Marvell>> fatload usb 0:1 0x0800000 uboot.bin
Marvell>> nand erase 0x0 0xa0000
Marvell>> nand write 0x0800000 0x0 0xa0000
Marvell>> reset

Conclusion

After the sheevaplug has rebooted, you should have the new version:

NOTE: For those of you who prefer bash to php, I wrote a bash script to replace the runme.php script included in the tarball, you can get it there.