Mike McCullough wrote:
BTW: MCC Systems sells a "Linux SDK" which includes a port of U-Boot to the MVME5500 board (see http://www.mccengineering.com/linuxsdks.htm)
Actually, MCC does NOT have a port of U-boot to the Motorola 5500 board as we used the onboard MOTload software instead. Since MOTLoad worked just fine for us (once we figured it out) we didn't do the U-Boot port.
MotLoad actually netboots fine, but AFAIK it doesn't boot from flash (a capability I already have gladly exploited with the MVME2100 and the PPCbug). While it seems that a lot of setups often seem to be perfectly ok with a netboot (which seems to be very popular with VxWorks as well), for my setup a flash boot setup would really be the better choice - especially since on the MVME5500 flash is an abundant resource: 32-40MB are more than enough for a really nice root filesystem, don't you think? (I've not even ran out of the 4MB on the MVME2100 by now - thanks, uClibc and BusyBox!!!)
Maybe we should start a "black list" of companies who don't give their patches back to the public source tree.
Well, everything that we list on our Web site is freely available. You just have to do the same amount of hunting (and integration!) that MCC did.
I'm not fond of black-listing myself. Isn't that what big companies do??
Well, as long as the Linux vendors either hide their Linux kernels, or release only trimmed down versions of them (and no patchset), I guess the bootloader is not the worst problem - ok, ok, of course to people on this list this is actually an issue at heart!! But with all the closed mailing lists, and proprietary patchsets for customers only, open-source projects seem to be pretty much to be on the exploited side of the deal to me. :(
This is of course a general comment, and not about your special SDK vendor, which I have no experience with yet!
Thanks, and with kind regards, Oliver Korpilla