Bootloader

[Felipe Balbi]

On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 03:58:26PM -0300, Werner Almesberger wrote:
> Andy Green wrote:
> > and patch out any other junk that leaks in to get the
> > same effect.
> 
> That gets messy very quickly. E.g., just look at cpu/arm920t/start.S
> which, besides the storage driver, which only needs reading, is
> about all the "difficult" code we can share. Most of the other
> essential stuff, memory timing, GPIOs, PMU, PLL magic, etc., lives
> in board/neo1973/.
> 
> u-boot can be a great reference for the basic setup process and
> perhaps some driver fragments, but there's way too much other stuff
> that can only get in the way if you try to "dumb it down".
> 
> Really, in the time it took us to get u-boot to do what we need, we
> could have written half a dozen primitive boot loaders from scratch.

Really, why would we need any device driver in the bootloader?
Bootloader are not meant to deal with the device, they let the OS do it.

And you're right, we could write a dozen of minimal bootloaders by the
same time we spend fixing/maintaining u-boot.

-- 
Best Regards,

Felipe Balbi
me at felipebalbi.com
http://blog.felipebalbi.com