On Thu, Oct 13, 2011 at 09:22:51PM +0200, Henrik Nordström wrote:
Been a rather intense discussion regarding U-Boot on IRC today, and
time
for some reflections and a little decision to be taken.
In stage3 we do have an u-boot package which provides uboot images for
pandaboard, trimslice, beagleboard and some more. The pandaboard
requires u-boot on the boot media, while on trimslice the vendor
provided u-boot is in reality quite sufficient and stored separately in
a nor flash chip.
Several (myself included) thinks it would be good if Fedora fully
supported some boards, with both kernel & up to date bootloader
(u-boot). But u-boot is not a fedora package today and will require both
willing maintainers and package review to happen.
So time for some questions.
Should Fedora for ARM officially support for some well known boards?
I think that makes sense, it will create a lower entry level for people
who want to run Fedora on their ARM device.
Do you think Fedora should provide the bootloader for well known
boards
where the required board support is merged mainline?
This would be the ultimate goal. But a very clear definition of which
boards (and possibly variants) is a must. If a board differs in only one
component, the boadloader image may not work (as expected).
Do you know anyone who would be willing to help maintain u-boot
within
Fedora?
I'm interested and would be able to help, at least for some boards.
Should u-boot images then also be provided for boards without a
trivial
recovery mechanism in case an u-boot update fails? Where there is a risk
of creating bricks if the user do not have jtag access to their board.
Some way of recovery should be thought about.
Maybe chain-load 'our' u-boot image (if possible) and only install it on
the flash if it passes some tests. - But that's thinking out loud...
Note: Supporting u-boot on boards without mainline u-boot support is
not
an option.
Of course not :) Only support what it merged, if we write patches, make
sure that upstream accepts them before including them in the package.
What about systems that use OpenFirmware or any of the other
bootloaders? u-boot is likely the one used most, but we need to keep an
eye on other solutions as well, not?
Cheers,
Niels
Regards
Henrik
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