From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Thomas Petazzoni Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2013 21:20:02 +0100 Subject: [Buildroot] uboot-tools and uboot being separate In-Reply-To: <511BCBEE.5040704@siganos.org> References: <511BCBEE.5040704@siganos.org> Message-ID: <20130213212002.25c976ca@skate> List-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: buildroot@busybox.net Dear Dimitrios Siganos, On Wed, 13 Feb 2013 17:22:54 +0000, Dimitrios Siganos wrote: > I have a query regarding uboot and uboot-tools. Currently they are > separate packages. > > However, if I am building both the uboot bootloader and the uboot tools > would it not be reasonable to expect to use the same sources for > compiling both? At the moment, I am in a situation where I am building > uboot with one set of files and uboot-tools (e.g. fw_printenv) with another. > > Is the recommended solution to point both uboot and uboot-tools to the > same package version and apply the same patches to both? And have two > parallel builds (uboot, uboot-tools) that should be identical? No. You don't have to have identical uboot-tools and uboot. Basically uboot-tools provide one tool to create U-Boot images (mkimage) and tools to manipulate the U-Boot environment from Linux (fw_printenv, fw_setenv). Those tools are backward compatible, and so you can perfectly use the tools from U-Boot 2010.x with a running U-Boot 2012.x or 2013.x. There is really no need to have the same source code base for both uboot and uboot-tools. > I have also being thinking along these lines: > > 1) Edit the uboot-tools makefile to not use its own build directory but > use uboot's build instead (silly idea idea I admit, but you never know...). > > 2) Edit the uboot package to optionally compile and install the > uboot-tools as well (this seems to me to be the most logical way). > > Can I have your feedback? Basically, no, there's a good reason why we wanted two separate packages: we wanted to be able to build the U-Boot tools sometimes for the host (mkimage), sometimes for the target (fw_printenv, fw_setenv). The host-uboot-tools package is also used as a dependency of the Linux kernel package, and it is much simpler to depend on host-uboot-tools that to depend on the uboot package itself. So really, the current way things are done for uboot vs. uboot-tools has proven to work really well, and for now I don't see a compelling reason to change that. Best regards, Thomas -- Thomas Petazzoni, Free Electrons Kernel, drivers, real-time and embedded Linux development, consulting, training and support. http://free-electrons.com