[PATCH 0/3] Qi booting control from rootfs

Werner Almesberger werner at openmoko.org
Tue Nov 25 17:12:56 CET 2008


Andy Green wrote:
> Still, we would actually have to parse U-Boot env partition completely
> with U-Boot rules and pass it to kernel to fulfil the sharing aspect,
> that's no good.  Let U-Boot boot according to its rules that Qi won't
> impact, and U-Boot rules won't impact Qi.

Yes, that's what I meant too. If the Qi parameters live in the second
erase page, they're still in an area normally occupied by u-boot.

I wouldn't go as far as automatically migrating partition table
information, and even if we really wanted to do this, we could just
provide a script that runs under Linux that does this when installing
Qi. We already have a tool that gives access to the u-boot environment:
http://svn.openmoko.org/trunk/src/host/envedit/
It can run both on the host and on the Neo.

> That's not what people are doing, they have multiple partitions /
> distros on one increasingly large SD card, and it is useful that each
> can have a boot context attached to it rather than one instance of some
> magic partition that contains it.

Okay, so SD cards are really getting used like disks already. Nice :-)
Anyway, I guess that's not an attractive option with NAND, both due
to size and due to handling constraints.

- Werner



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