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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