link: www.avrfreaks.net ----- Original Message ----- From: "Wolfgang Denk" wd@denx.de To: "Ulf Samuelsson" ulf@atmel.com Cc: u-boot-users@lists.sourceforge.net Sent: Saturday, April 21, 2007 12:59 AM Subject: Re: [U-Boot-Users] Proposal for patch to configure networkparameters
In message 027c01c78394$16500590$01c4af0a@Glamdring you wrote:
Why should you care if the customer sets a configuration value at compile time or dynamically?
I don't care about this.
By setting things at compile time, you allow the board to boot up, download a script which gets executed by "autoscr" This script will sets the REAL values for the network. Obviously the values should only be used until manually changed.
OK, in such a configuration you can add the values to the board config file, as there is no need to change them frequently, right?
Not sure, if this is your problem.
No.
Assume you have no serial communication available... How do you reconfigure the system?
We are not talking about reconfiguration, but about how to initialize the default environment. These are two different things.
Can you explain how to download the environment using the network if you are not allowed to compile in the network parameters?
You don't have to download such parameters.
Please feel free to set these values somewhere during board production, but you better not embed them into the default U-Boot image. There are several methods to initialize such parameters which are much cleaner. For example, some boards use some hardware ID block which gets written separately from the U-Boot image, which then can contain board specific parameters like serial number, MAC address, and - if you like - additional default netowrk configuration.
Why do you need to separate something which NEVER is going to be written again? There is a cost involved with doing multiple programming steps and those should be minimized.
Even if you have multiple servers you can still allocate a duplicated IP address to a network port on each server which is a point to point connection to the board to be produced.
If there is a need to change these values, a simple recompile will fix that.
And still: The proposed patch will not do anything with network parameters It will allow people to generate whatever config variables outside U-boot.
How they use this, you will not be aware of so I really do not understand why you are against the patch.
The only thing the patch does is to add #include <custom.h> in the config.h
and then an empty custom.h is created to make sure that it does not crash compiles of existing boards. . The patch has really nothing to do with networking, so I suggest we stop discussing networking configuration and start discussing the patch.
Are you against giving developers freedom?
Best Regards Ulf Samuelsson