Dear Wolfgang Wegner,
In message 20100916101810.GH25692@leila.ping.de you wrote:
I see this feature not only nice to speed up development, sometimes it also comes in really handy for production, too - if you have to
I think we all agree that this would be a nice-to-have feature.
struggle with debugging tools that are either plain too stupid to program some flash devices or are much slower than U-Boot, you can simply run a specially built version from RAM and/or provide it with an environment in RAM to do all the actual flashing for the board production.
Note the "specially built version". My understanding is that this "special building" cannot be avoided in general.
For some targets, there may be fragments present in the code when searching for CONFIG_MONITOR_IS_IN_RAM, which statically disables all the low-level initialization to allow U-Boot being loaded from a first-stage loader or debugger. But beware, it is not always functional out-of-the-box.
True. And the image configured that way is not the same binary image that you normally load into flash.
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk