On Wed, 30 Jan 2008, Ulf Samuelsson wrote:
Nicolas Pitre wrote:
But does U-Boot properly provide machine information to the kernel these days? I have been and still being burned by U-Boot hardcoding the _wrong_ machine ID, and therefore custom built kernels from k.o simply won't boot on those boards without hacking the kernel source.
With "our" U-Boot you can override the compiled-in machid with an environment variable. I didn't implement this patch but I think it's not that difficult. I will check tomorrow if I can easily get a patch out of our scm.
I proposed this patch for a long time, but it was rejected by Wolfgang.
And may Wolfgang explain just why?
I am seeing multiple companies implementing small CPU modules incorporating CPU + FPGA, and the customers will adopt the FPGA code for their own need, and then they need to create a new machine id.
Having such a patch will allow people in this situation to use the U-Boot on the board without recompilation.
Yes, and it will considerably reduce the grundge against U-Boot from kernel people, myself included.
The current situation with U-Boot simply encourage people to put stupid hacks in the kernel instead in order to work around this U-Boot artificial limitation, which is not bringing any sympathy for better U-Boot support in the kernel build system amongst other things.
So I'm asking for Wolfgang to seriously reconsider accepting this patch.
Nicolas