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

[Stephen Warren <swarren@wwwdotorg.org>]

On 08/05/2013 01:50 PM, Dennis Gilmore wrote:
> On Mon, 05 Aug 2013 12:39:03 -0600 Stephen Warren <swarren@wwwdotorg.org> wrote:
>> On 08/03/2013 01:11 AM, Dennis Gilmore wrote:
>>> I wanted to start a discussion on defining a unified feature set
>>> that makes it simpler for the different distros to support ARM
>>> systems using u-boot.
...
>>> so this would mean similar partitioning. i.e. /boot on ext4 root and
>>> swap  on lvm or as raw partitions. people should be able to have
>>> just / on ext4 also. Down the road xfs /boot support would be a
>>> nice to have.
>>
>> That's only partially relevant for U-Boot. Two things U-Boot needs to
>> support:
>>
>> * Filesystem read for whatever filesystem /boot is part of (it could
>> very well be the / filesystem too, but U-Boot doesn't care, except
>> for / vs. /boot in path names). This is a matter of adding the right
>> flags to each board's U-Boot config file.
> 
> right, but at the least it needs to be ext4 not all boards today read
> ext4, btrfs may be something down the road also. u-boot doesnt need to
> care too much. it just needs to look in / and /boot

Well, ext4 is nice, but presumably everything could work just as well
with ext3 or ext2. It's not really an issue other than arguing semantics
though; U-Boot has ext4 support so it's presumably just a matter of
persuading the relevant board maintainers to enable it, or sending them
patches to do so?

...
>> [ Tegra boot.scr discussion ]
>
> While this is a step forward, its still much more than we need to do
> if we enable pxe support and use sysboot to load a config file the
> says load this kernel and initramfs and pass these bootargs. My
> initial post had a fully working example.

Oh, I must have not read your email correctly. I thought the config file
you posted was as example of what you wanted to achieve, rather than
something which already worked.

Is it just a matter of turning on some config options in upstream U-Boot
to enable this on Tegra? If so, I'd be very happy to create a patch to
do so, test it with Fedora's images (got a link/README/...?) and send
the patch to be applied.