Which bootsplash method will be used in openmoko?

[Harald Welte]

On Fri, Feb 16, 2007 at 08:45:42PM +0100, Michael 'Mickey' Lauer wrote:
> > I was reading about using u-boot to display a bootsplash, which is a
> > pretty neat idea, but it has 2 downsides:
> 
> > 1) it's bound to u-boot, which is OK for the neo, but not for other machines

At this point I'm really in favour of running u-boot on about any
machien that we will 'officially' support.  It's my preferred chioice
definitely for the future of OpenEZX, too. 

Even as far as future OpenMoko-running FIC  devices are concerned,
u-boot will be our first choice.  That's mainly because we've invested a
lot of time into really flexible and coherent NAND bad block handling,
as well as USB bootloader console and USB firmware upgrade goes.

So yes, there will be other devices who might not have u-boot.  But
that's really not our main focus at this point.

> > 2) it doesn't allow a progressbar
> 
> The bootsplash issue has a couple of layers. We have to distinguish
> between U-Boot bootup, Kernel bootup, Userland bootup (read: sysinit).
> 
> We definitely want to use U-Boot bootsplash, since loading the uImage
> from flash takes a while. We then want to keep this displayed during
> kernel display (hence overriding the default penguin/konsole)

Which would mean that the actual splash screen had to be stored twice
(once in u-boot accessible 'splash' partition, and once as kernel splash
image).  I'm pondering to hard-code some hack into the kerrnel which
just copies the old framebuffer content (u-boot framebuffer address is
fixed at compile time) into the newly-allocated kernel framebuffer.

-- 
- Harald Welte <laforge at openmoko.org>          	        http://openmoko.org/
============================================================================
Software for the world's first truly open Free Software mobile phone