U-Boot Not Booting from Flash Memory on Arty A7 100T FPGA

Question

I'm working on booting U-Boot from the SPI flash memory of an Arty A7 100T FPGA and encountering an issue where U-Boot does not execute after power-on

Issue

U-Boot does not produce any output on the UART console when booting from flash

Setup:

1. I have built U-Boot for my RISC-V-based system and flashed it to SPI flash at address 0x0C000000
2. The expectation is that, upon power-on, the bootloader should be loaded from flash into RAM and executed

Observations:

1. After flashing the bitstream into the FPGA, the board powers on, but U-Boot does not boot. I see no output on the UART console.

2. To test the flash execution path, I flashed a small UART print test program to 0x0C00 0000, which worked correctly, confirming that the flash itself is accessible. I verified the U-Boot binary in flash, and it appears to be written correctly

3. However, if I load the same U-Boot image directly into RAM using GDB, it boots successfully, indicating that the image itself is functional

4. After flashing U-Boot into the flash, I verified that the contents were written correctly

What I need help with:

1. What could be preventing U-Boot from executing when loaded from flash?
2. What debugging steps can I take to analyze the issue further?
3. Could this be related to missing relocation, boot address misalignment, or an issue with the OpenSBI handoff?