On Mon, 2015-01-12 at 17:57 +0000, Ian Campbell wrote:
On Mon, 2015-01-12 at 10:34 -0700, Stephen Warren wrote:
- boot.scr must be generated (to boot.scr.uimg) using
bootloader-specific tools, rather than extlinux.conf, grub.conf, ... all just need the generation of a text file.
Debian already has the tooling (and has for years) to reproduce boot.scr automatically on upgrades of various relevant components, the user never needs to see the mkimage stuff (that tooling also handles various legacy non-config_distro_bootcmd systems, so it's going to have to remain for the time being either way).
Currently the extlinux.conf generating stuff is tied to the x86 syslinux packages, it could be reworked and pulled out into arch indep packages, but there doesn't seem to be all that much benefit compared with what we have now which is working fairly well for us (not to imply that it's perfect).
One big downside of the boot.scr as generated by flash-kernel in Debian is that it doesn't have a menu, which extlinux can provide currently. Thus with extlinux we could provide a more similar experience to what folks get on x86 with e.g. Grub, iotw select provide menu options to boot previous kernels or single user mode etc.
I do hope to get to experimenting a bit with this for the boards, i care about soon. My patchset that was in discussion there was actually some pre-work for those things ;). It would be nice if, in the end, flash-kernel wouldn't be needed for boards with modern u-boot and follwing the distro_boot_cmds, but I'm not actually involved with Debians u-boot package so not my call :)