On Thu, Jul 05, 2007 at 08:04:21AM +0200, Stefan Roese wrote:
From my experience, the first stage bootloader (bootstrap) can't be done platform independent. It will mostly consist of CPU-initialization and SDRAM-setup. And this is platform or even board dependent. We should describe what needs to be done in this bootstrap code, and perhaps come up with a general infrastructure on where this code should be located in the source tree.
This is basically the old minimum vs. maximum approach discussion; u-boot always followed a maximum approach, i.e. have a sophisticated bootloader which can do a lot of things, whereas other bootloaders always only initialized cpu+memory and gave the control over to linux.
What v2 tries to do is to separate u-boot internally into a minimum first stage plus a driver model based second stage.
So regarding Ulf's comments: yes, the initialization is platform dependend and will always be. But we are not talking about platform dependend vs. independend here, but about sane abstractions. With the abstractions done right, it doesn't matter if one platform has special needs, because it is independend of other things.
Robert