I'm working on a fairly simple project that needs to boot linux from NAND on a freescale i.MX28 platform, and there's a lack of consensus on how to handle the boot loader.
One option would be to simply use the stock freescale imx bootlets to load the linux kernel, the other to leverage u-boot.
Clearly u-boot has a lot more functionality and feature set than the basic bootlets, but for this project there's really nothing more needed from the bootloader then to load the kernel from nand and pass control to it, and one faction thinks it would be more efficient just to use the bootlets rather than adding u-boot to the mix.
Assuming a scenario where the boot loader is expected to just load a linux kernel and nothing else, what advantages would u-boot provide over the basic bootlets? I know that on some platforms the IPL isn't very good at handling bad blocks or other issues, and having it load a very small u-boot which would then be used to load the larger kernel is beneficial, but I'm not sure if that's the case for the bootlets.
I'd appreciate any opinions or reasoning I could take back to the team to help make a decision, thanks…