Qi - why only 3 partitions on SD card?

[Paul Fertser]

Torfinn Ingolfsen <tingox at gmail.com> writes:
>     And in fact if anybody of those talking about bootmenu, multiboot and
>     such really needed it he would have done it himself long time ago. I
>     bet trying and tweaking all distros including Qtopia, Qtmoko, Android,
>     H:1 etc etc took them 10x time required to build a minimal
>     bootmenu.
>
> Developers and users have different views of what is required to
> make a device usable.  Unless the developers recognize that, and
> produce something that the users find acceptable, the device in
> question will remain a gadget for developers.

I'm not a dev. I don't maintain anything. And don't write
anything. I'm just using FR as my only daily phone since November.

>     Hm, i have my "normal" one on uSD and in case i screw something up i
>     just boot pre-installed 2007 from NAND by pressing AUX button at the
>     right time (and yes, i can't manage it with 100% success rate but
>     taking out the battery and trying again is not a big deal).
>
> Lucky you. I have tried the "press AUX button" trick a lot of times,
> I can _never_ make Qi boot anything other that the default (first)
> partition on my SD card. Like this: - I don't press anything, the
> default partition gets booted - I press AUX (hopefully at the right
> time), and Qi never finshes booting anything (not in 5 - 10 minutes
> anyway).

Why don't you add an additional delay or led blink to it to make it
more explicit?

>     Someone said that Qi is unusable by "normal" users. I wanted to prove
>     it wrong.
>
> IMHO, you failed to prove anything.  I still say that Qi is unusable
> for normal users - it doesn't have a reliable way for users to
> select which partition to boot.

I'm not sure the majority of users really want it, there was no such
poll.

> To a user, it might look like this:
> - U-boot wasn't working correctly with newer (bigger) kernels, so
> the developer(s) abandoned it

False statement.

> - instead they created Qi to be newer, better, faster and so on

Qi was created to have a minimal simple easily maintainable
bootloader, take a look at coreboot project to understand the idea
behind Qi. U-boot is just wrong for this kind of device: it's
neverending porting of Linux drivers to u-boot which doesn't make much
sense when you can boot Linux, the kernel directly.

Qi is really simple and (almost) clean, and it can boot kernels. I
don't understand why you think one should want to maintain huge and
complex u-boot instead of small simple Qi. It boots kernels -> good
enough. KISS

> - Qi isn't living up to promises for users

Qi is working almost bugfree. It does what was promised. If anyone with
a debugboard or the simplest UART-whatever converter (i've just built
one myself based on FT232R, damn simple; the same goes for MAX232 etc,
it's not _that_ hard to find RS-232 even nowadays) can reproduce any
bug with it, please report it on trac, i promise i will try to fix it.

Lack of menu with initramfs says imho that nobody really needs it or
else it would have been created long time ago.

> I'm not saying that such a view is correct, but that is how it can
> look like from a users view.

I hope now i clarified it enough to explain why it's not correct.

> By derfinition, only developers can fix the software.

It would be interesting to see this definition...

> Now, will any developer step up and fix Qi (or U-boot) so that it
> will be usable for users?

If you're ok with initramfs solution (and i haven't yet seen a single
point why it's not ok) then it seems it's not a matter of fixing Qi,
rather a matter of implementing an initramfs menu...

> If no developer wants to scratch that particular itch, the
> FreeRunner will remain a gadget for developers only.

Hehe, how scary ;)

BTW, no offense meant, take it easy dude :)

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