this week work on KBOOT

Andy Green andy at openmoko.com
Mon Jun 2 21:35:53 CEST 2008


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Somebody in the thread at some point said:
| Andy, Werner,
|
|>  We have to differentiate between possible GTA01/02 reformat and GTA03
|> |> usage.  All I am worrying about is GTA03.
|> |
|> | Yeah, I wouldn't consider such sweeping changes to GTA01/GTA02,
|> | except for prototyping.
|>
|> For whatever reason, that is what Wolfgang started this off with.
|
| Easy, because weeks ago I believe Werner thought this might be something
| interesting to work on.

You wrote on 2008-04-23 12:18:

''Werner,
we have a long standing plan of using kboot instead of u-boot to boot
GTA01 (or GTA02).
If anybody would want to look into this problem, what would be your
approach?
Maybe you also throw in the ideas we had about using that opportunity to
simplify the partitions and more?

Basically I am hoping that your plan can serve as a guideline to a new
engineer who could then look into this problem.
Thanks a lot!
Wolfgang ''

If I understood it Werner doesn't seem to think it is a good idea either
to target GTA01 / GTA02 with this stuff.  So: "for whatever reason"
because there doesn't seem to be one.

| After many many mails with brutally complicated English, I'm sure you
| two left Xiangfu in a state of total confusion.

I have only ever written exactly 4 emails to Xiangfu outside this
thread.  The biggest one is not even about his work.

*** ''2008-04-29 09:03:  Sounds great.

We talked about a minimal bootloader a while back, and one of the things
we really wanted to get away from was the "U-Boot environment" concept.
~  But after some thinking we ended up that despite getting rid of
everything else (even dynparts by allowing oversized partitions) we
would need a Linux kernel commandline - only - that can be stored
somewhere.''


*** ''2008-05-18 08:53:  If I was doing this, I would think about two ways

~ - reduce the U-Boot configure to this minimum, then delete all sources
~ not compiled from U-Boot tree, clean down the Makefile, until you can
have the minimum needed

~ - capture the existing U-Boot build actions into a script, ie, watch
the gcc command lines used and copy the ones for the files you are
interested in.  Simulate just running those with your script. ''


*** ''2008-05-23  07:36:  (this is actually a reply to Peter Rasmussen's
original post, not directly to xiangfu) The way to solve that is to have
a small, eg, 8MB FAT partition first, containing the kernel, with a
second ext2 partition in the rest of the card containing the rootfs.
U-boot can succeed to parse the FAT partition and pull out a kernel
image file into memory, boot into that, rootfs is set for the second
partition on kernel commandline.

[snip quote]

SDHC is a disconnected issue, you can do the above on an old non-SDHC
card.  I added SDHC support to the U-boot Glamo SD driver, but I guess
you are talking about GTA01.  Because of the "flat" nature of U-Boot
stuff, ie, there is no "mmc layer", the driver is responsible to issue
his own MMC/SD commands at the driver layer, so that is where SDHC is
implemented.  If someone with GTA01 -- and a debug board ;-) -- wants to
compare the Glamo SD driver in U-Boot and the existing driver, they will
see it won't be a huge job to copy the SDHC support.  The differences to
take care about are that it counts blocks now not bytes, and there is a
different canned sequence of SD commands, but the ones that worked here
are in the Glamo driver already.

[snip quote]

I think being able to quickly have write access to the SD Card is good,
but I don't think U-Boot has to be or should be part of that picture.
If you change init=/bin/sh and boot again, here you are at a Linux
prompt a few seconds after Linux begins boot... boot to a script instead
like "/etc/startup" that sets up ifconfig and so on and you are
network-capable over the USB in a few seconds after Linux begins boot.

U-Boot isn't the future.''


*** ''2008-05-27 15:21: svn is deprecated for kernel, you should use git

http://git.openmoko.org

follow the instructions on the "kernel.git" link.

Your other problem seems to be you didn't set PATH to point to the
compiler binaries dir.  See the "build" script on "andy" branch of git
kernel for a canned way to solve this (change it at the top to point to
where your compilers live).''


If Xiangfu is having problems, I really do not think either conflicting
demands (Werner has been away for a month), "many many" mails from me,
or even my English is making them for him.

| Let's try this: Please settle on a specific u-boot/Kboot/Kexec task for
| Xiangfu. He has a gta01 and gta02.
| Explain it in simple English. Do not argue with each other.

| If you two are unable to do this, I will try to find a task from our
| long list of open issues, and then don't complain 'for whatever
reason' :-)

I'll discuss this with Werner.

- -Andy
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