Which bootsplash method will be used in openmoko?

Michael 'Mickey' Lauer mickey at openmoko.org
Sun Feb 18 23:53:04 CET 2007


Harald Welte wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 16, 2007 at 08:45:42PM +0100, Michael 'Mickey' Lauer wrote:
>> > I was reading about using u-boot to display a bootsplash, which is a
>> > pretty neat idea, but it has 2 downsides:
>> 
>> > 1) it's bound to u-boot, which is OK for the neo, but not for other machines

> At this point I'm really in favour of running u-boot on about any
> machien that we will 'officially' support.  It's my preferred chioice
> definitely for the future of OpenEZX, too. 

> Even as far as future OpenMoko-running FIC  devices are concerned,
> u-boot will be our first choice.  That's mainly because we've invested a
> lot of time into really flexible and coherent NAND bad block handling,
> as well as USB bootloader console and USB firmware upgrade goes.

> So yes, there will be other devices who might not have u-boot.  But
> that's really not our main focus at this point.

>> > 2) it doesn't allow a progressbar
>> 
>> The bootsplash issue has a couple of layers. We have to distinguish
>> between U-Boot bootup, Kernel bootup, Userland bootup (read: sysinit).
>> 
>> We definitely want to use U-Boot bootsplash, since loading the uImage
>> from flash takes a while. We then want to keep this displayed during
>> kernel display (hence overriding the default penguin/konsole)

> Which would mean that the actual splash screen had to be stored twice
> (once in u-boot accessible 'splash' partition, and once as kernel splash
> image).  I'm pondering to hard-code some hack into the kerrnel which
> just copies the old framebuffer content (u-boot framebuffer address is
> fixed at compile time) into the newly-allocated kernel framebuffer.

I recall something like a "SKIP early framebuffer init" patch against the
kernel which was done for this very reason of keeping the U-Boot
displayed until userland kicks in.

Now I found that during google but I can't any longer :/ I keep
looking.

Update: I found it again: It's in
http://www.mock.com/pdev/docs/DULG.pdf, chapter 9.5

Regards,

:M:
-- 
Michael 'Mickey' Lauer | IT-Freelancer | http://www.vanille-media.de




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