Merging Qi with coreboot?

[Troy Benjegerdes]

On Wed, Dec 03, 2008 at 04:08:48PM +0000, Andy Green wrote:
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> Somebody in the thread at some point said:
> 
> | I'd like to understand the motivation for Qi.. it really seems like it's
> | just a "YABL" (yet another boot loader). Why can't U-boot be made to
> 
> There's some explanation of why we moved off U-Boot here
> 
> http://git.openmoko.org/?p=qi.git;a=blob;f=README;h=198507c717cc8b5f8f72250f2caa28ffef1ac537;hb=HEAD
> 
> | boot "really fast", or if speed is the primary motivation, wouldn't it
> | make more sense to leverage the work begin done on Coreboot for x86?
> | (cold boot to linux console in 3 seconds on x86 hardware)
> 
> x86 and s3c device boot are very different, and we don't need to take
> care about a lot of PC-centric BIOS business.

To me, the point of Linuxbios/coreboot/qi is to bring up the hardware to
the point you can call 'start_kernel', and then Linux takes over all the
processor and hardware specific junk.

The only 'input' needed is to init the flash to where a known-good
payload is going to be, and jump to it. We may want to validate that
we're jumping to a valid image.. and maybe a cryptographic image
checksum just for good measure and extra paranoia. 

It would be really nice to use the same C code to enter the kernel
payload and pass in command line options on x86, s3c, PPC, etc etc