[U-Boot] Merging of v1 and v2

[U-Boot] Merging of v1 and v2

[Chris Zankel]

Hi,

Are there any plans to merge U-Boot v1 and v2 at anytime? It looks to me 
like a daunting task to move everything to v2.

We are working with different processors, one of them, the i.MX27, is 
only supported in v2, the other(s) in v1. The internal and external (UI) 
interfaces seem to be different enough to make it hard to move between 
the two. For example, there is some initial work to support UBIFS in 
U-Boot (v1) which might be interesting, but it probably requires quite 
some work and testing to move it into v2.

I like the flexibility and cleanness of v2, but fear that it will never 
catch on.

Thanks,
-Chris

[U-Boot] Merging of v1 and v2

[Robert Schwebel]

Hi Chris,

On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 02:57:51PM -0700, Chris Zankel wrote:
> Are there any plans to merge U-Boot v1 and v2 at anytime? It looks to
> me like a daunting task to move everything to v2.

There are no such plans yet.

> We are working with different processors, one of them, the i.MX27, is
> only supported in v2, the other(s) in v1. The internal and external
> (UI) interfaces seem to be different enough to make it hard to move
> between the two. For example, there is some initial work to support
> UBIFS in U-Boot (v1) which might be interesting, but it probably
> requires quite some work and testing to move it into v2.

Well, ubifs will probably be interesting enough for us to port it to v2
in the future. We have initial NAND support for MX27 and MX31 in the
meantime, so looking at JFFS2 alternatives will be on schedule here.

> I like the flexibility and cleanness of v2, but fear that it will
> never catch on.

U-Boot-v2 has followed a very pragmatic strategy since it's very
beginning. It solves real problems for us and it realizes things which
would not be possible in v1 (where the strategy is never to break
hundrets of boards).

It would be really great to see more community for v2, but things are as
they are and people work on it when it has benefits for them. The
community activities will show how successful it will be, in the end.

We here at Pengutronix are very convinced that, in order to make
*better* technology for the future (better maintainability, better code
quality, less problems) we have to go this way, and we want it to be
part of the U-Boot community, as U-Boot is a great project for booting
Embedded Linux systems.

So in the end, you have different possibilities:

- help porting features from v1 to v2, to make it more feature complete
- help porting technological things from v2 to v1, to make v1 gradually
  better with the ideas invented in v2
- do nothing and see how things evolve

rsc
-- 
 Dipl.-Ing. Robert Schwebel | http://www.pengutronix.de
 Pengutronix - Linux Solutions for Science and Industry
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