[U-Boot-Users] U-Boot-NG ?

Robert Schwebel
2007-07-05T07:01:26Z

On Thu, Jul 05, 2007 at 08:04:21AM +0200, Stefan Roese wrote:
> From my experience, the first stage bootloader (bootstrap) can't be
> done platform independent. It will mostly consist of
> CPU-initialization and SDRAM-setup. And this is platform or even board
> dependent. We should describe what needs to be done in this bootstrap
> code, and perhaps come up with a general infrastructure on where this
> code should be located in the source tree.

This is basically the old minimum vs. maximum approach discussion;
u-boot always followed a maximum approach, i.e. have a sophisticated
bootloader which can do a lot of things, whereas other bootloaders
always only initialized cpu+memory and gave the control over to linux.

What v2 tries to do is to separate u-boot internally into a minimum
first stage plus a driver model based second stage.

So regarding Ulf's comments: yes, the initialization is platform
dependend and will always be. But we are not talking about platform
dependend vs. independend here, but about sane abstractions. With the
abstractions done right, it doesn't matter if one platform has special
needs, because it is independend of other things.

Robert
--
Dipl.-Ing. Robert Schwebel | http://www.pengutronix.de
Pengutronix - Linux Solutions for Science and Industry
Handelsregister: Amtsgericht Hildesheim, HRA 2686
Hannoversche Str. 2, 31134 Hildesheim, Germany
Phone: +49-5121-206917-0 | Fax: +49-5121-206917-9