Bootloader
Werner Almesberger
werner at openmoko.org
Thu Mar 20 00:36:58 CET 2008
Andy Green wrote:
> "dynparts" rides again :-( I wonder if we steadily regenerate
> everything we wanted to discard.
Naw, for booting that would just be a block of data at a well-known
location in memory. The boot loader has to skip bad blocks anyway,
so it can do this for the parameter block as well.
> Thing that bothers me about initramfs is you have to sit there while you
> pull the whole thing before the kernel boots.
Aah, now I understand ! Yes, that's true. However, it should be fairly
small, maybe a couple of MB. So I'm not sure you'd really notice much
of a difference. We'll have to try it. If it's too slow, we can always
optimize later.
> But it is pretty ugly if we expose the block devices in linux bad blocks
> and all, with no OOB in there to even figure out if they are bad, that
> doesn't sound right.
Bad blocks are still marked in their OOB areas. The only thing that
would be missing is the bad block table, i.e., the ability to tell
whether a block is bad without actually accessing it. The way the
MTD code looks, this is supposed to work just fine.
- Werner
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