On 11/18/06, Wolfgang Denk wd@denx.de wrote:
In message BAY23-F2162CD86EF1030FE846BFA5EF0@phx.gbl you wrote:
Hi,everybody. I have some experience on RedBoot, another bootloader. The processor I used is IOP331 based on xscale architeture. When i was porting RedBoot to my hardware, I found it that RedBoot is a good bootloader with rich functions, but on the other hand complexity is increased. Since i just want to initilize my hardware and then load kernel, what i need really is a light-weight bootloader. I don't want to change my hardware, my friend suggest u-boot, but does anybody have such experience to run u-boot on IOP series?
It should be no problem to port U-Boot to your system.
But then, I doubt that U-Boot is more "light-weight" or significantly easier to port then redboot. In the end you will see that the necessary knoledge about your hardware and the botloader code is about the same.
Having ported both, I'd have to say u-boot is a much easier port. The required code and understanding is about the same, but the configuration and build scheme is fairly complex in eCos/Redboot. It has some nice features, but for just Redboot it's huge overkill. I like the makefile system in u-boot better.
The code in eCos is more structured and layered, so it tends to make you jump around a lot to follow whats going on. Both require a good understanding of cpp, but I think eCos abuses the preprocessor more :-).
u-boot seems to be more actively developed, and the mailing lists are much more active.
All that said, for similar features enabled, it's been my experience the image sizes are fairly close.