Antminer S9 board - plans and frustration

• Finish the ethernet driver for Kyu
• Finish fully annotating and documenting the bootrom
• Be able to compile U-boot from source and run it from an SD card
• Understand the NAND layout and fix my bricked board
• Generic vivavdo gpio bitstreams (for Kyu)
• MDIO for both zynq and h3

I would like to write a trivial bare metal demo that runs in OCM and could be put on an SD card in lieu of the FSBL. This would be a step in understanding why U-boot and bootgen won't play together.

This could lead to two variations. One would be using the "secret" serial protocol to load the demo. The other would be to use JTAG to debug it, if not even load it. I think this would all be fun and educational, but I just don't want to go down that road now.

I am tempted in my work on the ethernet driver to skip working on MDIO and just use it as left for me by U-boot. As I consider this, I remember that this is exactly what I did for the H3 ethernet driver -- so that is unfinished business that I am just remembering.

It seems absurd that xilinx has a U-boot repository on Github, that you can build from it, but there is no way to run it or do anything with it -- and that there is not basic documentation for the process. The U-boot build really ought to produce BOOT.BIN that could simply be copied to a fat32 partition on an SD card, and it is a shame that this is not so.