On Monday 06 April 2009 04:24:39 Wolfgang Denk wrote:
In message Ronen Shitrit wrote:
I'm not sure we are on the same page here, the Kirkwood has an internal bootROM which can only boot an image if this image is wrapped by a specific header.
What a stupid (read: broken) hardware design.
There are tons of standards for image formats, and even more commonly used formats I would not dare to call standard; but this processor has to invent yet another one?
true there are plenty of formats out there, but there arent really ones geared towards booting a processor. the ELF format is way too bloated/complex (and yet still not flexible enough) to be usable, and that's about the closest applicable format i'm familiar with. beyond the simple "processor will start execution at address XXXX", there isnt any standardization here.
the Blackfin processor too has a custom format (LDR) for booting code. it's akin to the PHDRs in ELF, plus some additional flag bits to control behavior. but in our world, i wrote external utilities to manage ELF->LDR conversion and so i didnt need a dedicated script in u-boot to do that ugly conversion mojo, just a new Makefile target (u-boot.ldr). -mike