uboot fails to automatically load uInitrd and boot hangs

[mahmoh]

Build Version/Date: u-boot-linaro-omap4-panda_2011.07.2-0ubuntu1_armel.deb
Environment used for testing: pandaboard A2

Summary: uboot fails to automatically load uInitrd and boot hangs

Steps to Reproduce: boot with no boot.scr or uEnv.txt files on SD

Expected result: u-boot loads uImage & uInitrd then boots

Actual result: u-boot loads uImage only then attempts to boot and hangs

<START>
Hit any key to stop autoboot: 0
reading boot.scr

** Unable to read "boot.scr" from mmc 0:1 **
reading uEnv.txt

** Unable to read "uEnv.txt" from mmc 0:1 **
reading uImage

4174740 bytes read
Booting from mmc0 ...
## Booting kernel from Legacy Image at 82000000 ...
   Image Name: Ubuntu Kernel
   Image Type: ARM Linux Kernel Image (uncompressed)
   Data Size: 4174676 Bytes = 4 MiB
   Load Address: 80008000
   Entry Point: 80008000
   Verifying Checksum ... OK
   Loading Kernel Image ... OK
OK

Starting kernel ...

Uncompressing Linux... done, booting the kernel.

<HANG>

[Ricardo Salveti (rsalveti)]

This is expected as the default boot sequence doesn't expect the user to provide an uInitrd. The hanging you're seeing is probably because of wrong cmdline arguments, as you're also just using the default one instead of the supported one by ubuntu.

Marking it as Invalid, but let me know if this is a valid use case for Ubuntu and we can try to create a fix for it.

[mahmoh (mahmoh)]

So the question is why not attempt to install the uInitrd and boot whether or not it's present? It's a rare case for Ubuntu to not provide an uInitrd; if we have pre-programmed uImage and uInitrd memory addresses why wouldn't we try and load both (not just uImage) and then boot?

[Ricardo Salveti (rsalveti)]

But as you'll need to provide at least a valid kernel cmdline (otherwise it's not going to boot), asking u-boot to load uInitrd seems the best way to go. I believe the only default behavior we want is to fallback to pxe when nothing is found at the sd card.