In message 47A76677.6080308@freescale.com you wrote:
Except for the declaration of the variable itself, *nothing* changes. What do you mean would become simpler?
A normal global variable is simpler than one that's tied to a specific register, wouldn't you say? I wasn't trying to be that insightful.
No, I wouldn't say that. To me a pointer that can live all the time in a register is simpler than one that lives somewhere in a memory location and has to be loaded for use - you can see this from the code size as well.
Also, it's pretty convenient for debugging, for example when you need to figure out where U-Boot was relocated to in RAM - just add the offset in struct global_data and you have the relocation offset, for example.
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk