[U-Boot] Unified u-boot feature set for simpler distro support

[Adam Conrad <adconrad@0c3.net>]

On Sat, Aug 10, 2013 at 12:11:38PM +0200, Wolfgang Denk wrote:
> 
> Why should the boot process take a minute or more when it could be
> done in a few seconds instead?

It takes your x86 kit a minute to load grub?  Hyperbole doesn't
help advance technical discussions.  Chaining another bootloader
into the mix, assuming you don't add arbitrary interruptable
config delays into each one, is probably a loss of tenths of a
second at most.

> I think we should focus on what users want and need, not what makes
> life easy for developers.

Not all users want or need the sane thing.  Users who want the
fastest possibly boot path are welcome to use u-boot (or find
something even faster) directly, and no one is suggesting taking
away u-boot's ability to boot a kernel and replacing that with
grub.

What people are suggesting is that distributions might want to
chain u-boot into grub to provide a consistent view to user-space
which, given the number of times I get new ARM users of my distros
asking questions like "how do I configure grub on this board?"
seems like it might not be a bad plan for a generic distro solution.

There's also the whole hyperscale story here, where server admins
tend to like things to be as similar as possible across platforms.
It's one of the massive selling features of distributions that port
to multiple architectures: once you're up and running, you don't
care that you installed to ARM, POWER, x86, etc.  But the one thing
that appears to confuse a lot of sysadmins is that every arch uses
a different boot method, and there's no reason we can't make this
easier.

(FWIW, I intend to finally switch Ubuntu/PPC to using grub2 as well,
for similar reasons.  yaboot isn't exactly rocket science to use,
but it's *different*, and for some users, a little different is all
it takes to get frustrated and drop a platform on the floor).

... Adam