Macho Hacking vs Product Development

[Andy Green]

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Somebody in the thread at some point said:
> On Sunday 09 March 2008 21:31:50 Andy Green wrote:
>> Almost everything we are doing in U-Boot is waste because we will
>> abandon it soon, NOR U-Boot especially so.
> 
> D'uh, I must have missed that -- can you point me to where, how, and who this 
> has been ultimately decided by/with/from?

Werner originally proposed the principle using his kboot stuff, I think
it is a good idea.  For me the kboot side itself is less critical than
establishing that we do the stuff Linux is good at with Linux and we
keep our bootloader on a strict and serious diet.  No shell, no video,
nothing like that.  The waste of cutting and pasting good drivers into
junk U-Boot unmaintained drivers is too awful to continue with.

kexec won't be used for normal boots for speed reasons, the bootloader
has just fat enough to pull final kernels (Linux or otherwise) in from
SD on VFAT for example and boot from there.  But for funkier stuff like
recovery, preferably kexec or a backup kernel+initrd can handle it.
Either way, any drivers or shells or whatever are always normal Linux
assets, so you can really imagine to easily make a graphical recovery or
backup usermode app, or anything else exploiting the full range of
capabilities from Linux networking, usb stack and so on.  Basically what
used to be out-of-bounds weird U-Boot stuff becomes fully accessible
normal Linux usermode stuff anyone can write for.

If you trash your main rootfs you hold down a key or whatever and come
up in the backup [kernel + mini rootfs], you can ssh into that from your
host, scp a new main rootfs or kernel and so on.

Normal boot time to a busybox shell should be ~ 5-7 seconds with such a
system.

Carsten, Werner and I discussed it at length in .tw and we all agreed it
was where we need to be going on.

- -Andy
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