Hi
I would like to thank all developpers and contributors of the U-Boot for their great work.
Last weekend I started a personal project in my free time to port the boot loader to the custom PPC405GPr board. (Not a hardware bringup). Reading the README and getting acquainted with the requirements took me a couple of days. Configuring, checking the 40 or so of the most important registers of the PPC405. I lost some hours as i misconfigured my setup to use the internal UART1 instead of the UART0 and as I mistrusted my serial USB connection (which is not very reliable on my Powerbook G4). So finally I had to use a Linux server at work to compile u-Boot and my WindowsPC as a serial console to convince me, that I had commited a programming error. But now everythink works fine at home.
Compared to my hardware bringup 15 months ago using vxWorks I was very pleased with the following aspects, where I think U-Boot is superior to vxWorks:
- U-Boot uses the internal 4 KB of static RAM as its initial stack and - the configuration of the SDRAM via SPI is done in C-code and not assembler! - nifty boot shell with if's - boot shell with a help system - nice info about the PHY (MII) - using the rest of the SPI-EEPROM as a storage to the environment - reading/writing the DCR registers - With about 120 KB a lot smaller than the corresponding 220 kB of a WALNUT booteprom from WindRiver
I can only recomment U-boot as a boot eprom and I hope I will be able to convince our management to use a lot of more free software (e.g. Linux or eCos as kernels) for our future products.
It was a joy to bring up this board with free software and I will try to boot Linux and RTAI using the ELDK. But I have to read a lot.
Best regards