[U-Boot] [PATCH v2 3/3] image: Allow images to indicate they're loadable at any address

Nicolas Pitre
2011-11-08T20:18:03Z

On Tue, 8 Nov 2011, Jason wrote:

> It sounds like you are intending for distributions to provide uImages.
> Why can't they provide a generic zImage, and a post-install hook runs
> mkimage to add the board specific uImage header? Similar to update-grub
> on x86{_64}. This seems _more_ flexible to me, and fitting with
> standard conventions distributions are accustomed to.

That means also distributing, and more importantly maintaining, a list
of boards and their particular requirements. Or, alternately, digging
into the u-Boot environment to figure out that information which is
fragile and certainly more complex than not having to do this operation
at all.

Standard conventions for distributions currently mean to simply drop the
kernel in a known location and let the bootloader load it without any
special wrapping. Given that they already handle grub config files,
having the same config format used on ARM would certainly make things
even more "conventional".

Maybe we could port grub2 to be executed on top of u-Boot as a second
stage bootloader?

Nicolas