Wolfgang corresponded with me over the weekend asking me to (in the interest of being fair) repost this message to the U-Boot list as well to allow you the opportunity to expound upon the benefits of U-Boot as our selection for our in-house universal boot loader.
You guys know best the glories of U-Boot. Convince me.
Andy
-----Original Message----- From: ANDY KENNEDY Sent: Friday, April 13, 2012 10:37 AM To: 'barebox@lists.infradead.org' Subject: I want to use Barebox
I first saw Barebox about a year ago, did a little poking around and realized that this seems like the way to go for booting an embedded system. I am, however, meeting opposition to implementing Barebox in our current system. I need some help on questions I cannot answer. If you could, please take the time to answer the following few issues.
1) I have a concern that barebox is not mainstream enough yet.
2) I have a feeling we will always be porting everyone's bsp (that already has a working u-boot) to barebox.
3) I also don't really see the real advantage over standard u-boot (what's the 'killer' application?).
From my point of view, the answer to 3 is clear: It uses the Linux
kernel as part of the boot, it can house an initrd so that extending the utilities of the bootloader will be easier to handle, etc. If this is in error, please correct me.
As for 1 & 2, these I just don't know about. I'm guessing that anything supported in either the Linux kernel or already in u-boot should be fairly easy to port into Barebox. Here, however, I have to define for Mgt clearly what does "fairly" mean.
Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.
Andy