[U-Boot-Users] RFC: Booting the Linux/ppc64 kernel without Open Firmware HOWTO

Benjamin Herrenschmidt
2005-05-18T23:32:16Z

> For others I wonder what the costs of this are in terms of the memory
> footprint (both RAM and ROM). Are there reference implementations in
> existence?

Oh, and to complete my answer, no there isn't per-se a reference
implementation yet. What exist so far, outside of actual full fledged OF
implementations, are IBM PIBS firmware for embedded which implements the
full OF client interface, and the kexec tools using the flattened
format. The reason why I'm writing this document is precisely to get
that developement started as part of uboot. As it was said earlier, no
new board support code will be accepted upstream if it doesn't use a
device-tree. This decision has been taken a while ago and will not be
changed.

There are IBM internal stuffs used for bringup that implement this, so I
can confirm it works :) But unfortunately, none of these can be
distributed at the moment, and thus they don't constitute a reference
implementation.

Ben.