On Sun, Feb 23, 2014 at 01:37:53PM +0000, Vasili Galka wrote:
Hi,
On our system, we are interested in keeping all files, including the OS image and U-Boot second stage on FAT filesystem residing on a SPI flash.
I have not found existing U-Boot support for such functionality. Have I missed it?
In any case, I'm willing to implement this, do you see it reasonable incorporating such code into U-Boot? (if it passes review of course)
I note about design: As our chip (TI's AM335x) does not support direct boot from FAT stored on SPI, I plan reserving section at the beginning of SPI flash for the first stage boot loader and having the filesystem after it.
The high level suggestion is to review your design decision as this seems rather questionable. Today our FAT code doesn't work directly on flash, but I imagine a day or two of hacking might allow it to work. But FAT isn't designed to be on flash directly and you really want a good reason to not be using a flash filesystem on SPI.