U-Boot improvements? (Was: Qi - why only 3 partitions on SD card?)

[Rask Ingemann Lambertsen]

On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 04:18:30PM +0200, Torfinn Ingolfsen wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 4:02 PM, Rask Ingemann Lambertsen <
> ccc94453 at vip.cybercity.dk> wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 11:11:04PM +0000, Niels Heyvaert wrote:
> >
> > > The idea of having a simple GUI boot loader could be very useful...
> >
> >    We have one. It's called U-Boot. Or am I missing something?
> 
> Apart for a fact that it has problem loading kernels over a certain size?

   Not as such, but it does lack kernel size detection when reading from
NAND flash. The config shipped by OM limits NAND flash kernels to 2 MB. Does
anybody actually (want to) ship kernels larger than that? Andy-tracking's
"packaging" config comes out to around 1.7 MB. NAND flash kernel size
detection wouldn't be all that difficult to add, though. Around 10-20 lines
of code.

> Or that it requires the kernel on a separate partition (which must be
> fat?)?

   It doesn't. I have the kernel on the Debian rootfs, which is ext2. I also
have an old SHR installation, also with the kernel on the ext2 rootfs.

> But this begs the question: could U-boot be improved to deal with the
> current requirements of the users?

   Probably. The first step is to list the requirements.

-- 
Rask Ingemann Lambertsen
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