On Fri, Aug 02, 2013 at 11:14:22AM +0200, Stefano Babic wrote:
Hi Rob, Dennis,
On 01/08/2013 19:19, Rob Herring wrote:
You both are missing the point. This patch doesn't address the problem, but does highlight it.
I am aware of it - I have already pointed out that we get many patches that have increased the default environment to something hard to maintain. This patch makes it more obvious.
The distros want to get out of having to know the u-boot environment details for every single board and need some level of standardization across platforms. The distros should only have to specify "boot the kernel at path/name X on device Y." They should not need to know what address to load the kernel to, but only that $kernel_addr_r is already setup. Variables are the first step. The second step is standardizing the boot commands.
I understand the point - but is the way to hard code together with u-boot the right way ? Do we have some other possibilities to do this ?
Maybe can be mkenvimage a solution (tools/mkenvimage) ? It creates an environment image from a simple ASCII text. The resulting image could be concatenated together with u-boot and in CONFIG_EXTRA_ENV_SETTINGS we could have for all boards a way to load it. Only a first idea, but as we recognize the issue, any idea to solve it ?
Distros generally hate the thought of having the user update U-Boot. Part of why I asked Dennis to post his patches here is that we need to start the conversation at least, and come up with a way that boards are likely to ship out of the box in a way that can be worked from, consistently at least across different vendor same arch SoCs. This would require some opt-in per board, certainly.