In message 406A31B117F2734987636D6CCC93EE3C017BA2FB@ehost011-3.exch011.intermedia.net you wrote:
Well, I cannot answer for all possible boards, but on 3 boards I have here (Spartan FPGA Microblaze core, Virtex FPGA PPC405 core, at91rm9200-ek ATMEL board) u-boot is configured to be compiled to run from RAM, gets loaded to RAM by another bootloader and runs there, yet u-boot looks for environment on the flash and "saveenv" saves environment onto flash. May be it's not a "canonical" way of running from RAM, but it's convenient for me.
The environment gets loaded into RAM from some persistent storage (often flash) into RAM when U-Boot initializes; then alloperations (setenv, references) are running on the in-RAM copy, and you can explicitely save the current settings to persistent storage using the "saveenv" command.
Is this difficult to understand?
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk