In message 000b01c7849f$f2050430$01c4af0a@Glamdring you wrote:
I want the configuration to be done without serial port communication Connect to Ethernet, wait for LED to blink, next board....
This is a perfectly valid requirement. It pops up with many vendors who use U-Boot on their boards. Many actually use this in production today.
Some read data from a special flash area, others run a script stored in flash. Some leave this script in the flash after production and eventually use it for example to implement reset to factory defaults, others erase or overwrite it or use self-deleting environment variables for a run-once setup.
According to Wolfgang, this promotes other people's evil doings and you must select a non-efficient solution if you want to use main tree u-boot.
I agree with you that the way how U-Boot gets configured needs improvement, but instead of implementing some "backdoor" to inject configuration information from a tool that lives outside the U-Boot tree we should try and improve the U-Boot code.
You are welcome to contribute to this, but please let's discuss design and implementations first, before submitting patches that may lead to discussions that are frustrating for both sides.
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk