Bootloader

Werner Almesberger werner at openmoko.org
Thu Mar 20 01:52:36 CET 2008


Andy Green wrote:
> <= 2MB is fine as initramfs for me but aren't we closing off the
> possibility for a wonderland of graphical apps and so on in there?  Or
> these must come from the main rootfs?

A "console" type system would probably even fit into 1MB of initramfs,
with a bit of squeezing. (kboot's initramfs currently takes about
400kB, but we may want to have a bit more stuff, perhaps use glibc,
and the kboot shell should really be rewritten in C.)

So there's still about 1MB for fancy GUIs.

And of course, those spare 4MB I'd allocate could be used for even
more graphical bloat :)

> Wow NAND really sucks badly.  I have used dd on the mtd block devices
> and just been lucky I guess.

Yeah, NAND has just about the right number of bad blocks that you
often don't notice during development, but there's no way to get
away with that in deployment.

(Early in GTA01 development, we sometimes even erased the factory
OOB markers and never suffered any ill consequences. It's a bit
scary if you consider that such things could also happen in the
factory process and would slip by completely unnoticed.)

- Werner




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