[U-Boot] [ARM] Environment variables not available during console initialisation?

[Scott Wood <scottwood@freescale.com>]

Guennadi Liakhovetski wrote:
> On Tue, 3 Feb 2009, Wolfgang Denk wrote:
>> I don't see what nand(_spl) maintainers should comment here  -  their
>> code  is  so  far  completley  unaffected.  We just agreed on needing
>> another call to the load routine.
> 
> We still have the other possibility - properly initialise NAND before 
> calling env_init() and then read out env? This would be a preferred 
> solution IMHO, because it leverages restrictions like "only the boot 
> NAND," simplifies the choice of a location in RAM, leaves nand_spl code 
> intact, thus avoiding even minimal size increment. NAND maintainer's 
> opinion as to how feasible / difficult this would be would be appreciated. 
> Or even better - a patch:-) I think, we could even move mem_malloc_init() 
> before the initcall loop and use a malloc()ed buffer just as 
> env_relocate() would do.

Besides Wolfgang's comment that this would preclude serial output during 
NAND init, this won't work if you're booting from NOR flash and thus 
don't have RAM initialized yet.  And even with NAND boot, this is prior 
to relocation to the top of RAM, which might complicate things.

We could leave nand_spl code completely untouched if we pad the NAND 
image to a block boundary, and then append the environment.  nand_spl 
would just see a larger image.

-Scott