would anybody be able to dump their larger firmware chip on the backside of their VF2? (preferably a board revision 1.3b.
i got my vf2 broken from the factory (fully sealed), and I wanna have a last shot at reviving it after bootloader recovery not loading up many times. I am not able to refund it anymore.
Try booting directly from sdcard. Push DIP switch 1 to the right and 2 to the left as the image shows. The zero-stage firmware is baked inside the silicon and truly read-only, so it’s impossible to be corrupted. Be aware that there’s a possibility that booting directly from sd-card could fail due to the firmware (unchangeable) code not setting the pin drive-strength correctly. That’s why starfive recommend you to boot from qspi, then chainload to the sdcard. (To workaround the firmware bug they created) But in our case, we want to isolate the problem. Thus, try booting from sdcard directly. If it’s not working, try reset and boot again. If there’s really no response from uart given several attempts, then yea, there’s likely a problem with the board.
Yes, but I already tried everything (not sure if I said previously). I tried image 55, 69, every official image up to the latest one and even an arch linux build, but U-boot simply shows the version and freezes. (in the serial terminal)
Like so:
This indicates the board has booted. One HW issue I can think of is bad DRAM, because u-boot SPL runs in L2LIM (think of it as SRAM), then it copies opensbi/u-boot to DRAM and starts running in memory. If the DRAM is bad, it can lead to all sorts of issues. But before we conclude it’s bad HW, can you double check if the sdcard has been correctly imaged? Did you dd the entire image on to the sdcard? Can you do a cmp -l <sdcard device> <image file> on your developer machine and check the integrity of it?
yes, I dd’d the whole image.
here’s the output
still not booting, despite imaging a fresh copy of image-55
