EC, CForth exploratory commands?

[Jon Nettleton]

On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 7:21 AM, Mitch Bradley <wmb at firmworks.com> wrote:
> Recompiling can work if you fine tune your build and download setup so
> the crank-turn time is very short, like less than a minute.
>
> The very first thing I did when I joined OLPC was to fix the firmware
> downloader.  I was on a conference call with Richard and Jim Gettys and
> some guys from Quanta.  The report was that it took something like 15
> minutes to put in new firmware, using a DOS program that talked to a
> serial download port on the EC that owned the SPI FLASH.  My head
> exploded.  I knew that the hardware was capable of programming that size
> SPI FLASH in less than a minute, so I started looking for bottlenecks
> and quickly found them.
>

I was talking with bunnie and xobs about doing something similar for
the iMX6 platform that bootstraps from SDHC.  Since they had already
reverse-engineered the linux firmware for at least one type of SDHC
card, we figured we could run that on the FPGA and interface the FPGA
out to a microsdhc connection.  This would allow us to compile uboot
and install it to a ramdisk that would be immediately available to the
iMX6 board to attempt to boot and debug.  I will let you know my
initial bringup of the SolidRun boards got me very adept at swapping
microsdhc cards. ;-)

But I do like having the bootloader right on the SDHC card.  Virtually
unbrickable.