[U-Boot] Is there a better way?

[Scott McNutt <smcnutt@psyent.com>]

Hi Chris,

Ira W. Snyder wrote:
>> My problem:
>> If I have an in-memory filesystem on my board (the ramdisk), and I have the
>> entire 256MB of memory accessible to the host over the PCI bus, you'd think
>> I could write a tool (or find a tool) that I could point at a block of
>> physical memory and have it recognize it as an ext2 filesystem and read it
>> as such. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be a precedent for doing
>> this. Is there a better way to accomplish my goal of getting my logs off the
>> ramdisk on the board from the host?
>>
> 
> I've solved a relatively similar problem here. I have a
> mpc8349emds-based board that is a PCI target. I've written a couple of
> smallish drivers for U-Boot and Linux that make the board seem like an
> ethernet interface.

Ditto. Ira's suggestion is a very elegant and useful technique ... and
has been used successfully for many applications.

> We tftp our kernel and boot our board over NFS using the "ethernet"
> interface.

As Ira suggests, once your target appears as an addressable host, the
sky's the limit. You can telnet/ssh into your target, run tftpd,
run a web server for configuration/status, etc. Cool stuff!

Regards,
--Scott