Upgrade CFE on the BCM91250A

Support for the BCM91250A board was dropped from Debian. This page is only provided for historical purposes.

In order to install Debian, you might have to upgrade the firmware (CFE) on your BCM91250A. Older versions used ide0 to refer to the first IDE device while newer versions use ide0.0. I've obtained an image of CFE 1.0.40 from Broadcom which has supports for VGA init, USB, IDE, and everything else. It's also the "bi-endian" version, meaning it should boot either big or little endian by changing jumper J1 on your SWARM.

To update your flash, put the cfe-ws-ex.flash image to your TFTP server. Check that the md5sum matches 4102210a104b1e30ecb0ebcf7980976b. Then, do:

CFE> ifconfig eth0 -auto
CFE> flash hostname:path/to/cfe-ws-ex.flash flash0

Since it's a bi-endian image, it's pretty big and may take 30-40 seconds to write to flash. If you press the reset button after it's done, you should be up and running with the new version. Please note that once you've started to flash this new version, you may not interrupt the process! If you interrupt you, you may end with a board which no longer boots. Also note that this flash image is provided under no warranty. It worked for me and some others, but it may not work for you.

Thanks to Mitch Lichtenberg of Broadcom who provided most of the information for this CFE page.