On Thu, 2006-09-14 at 14:07 -0700, Bruce_Leonard@selinc.com wrote:
- Will u-boot support a compact flash device on the local bus of an
MPC8347 (we would like to get u-boot from a small I2C EEPROM and everything else including the kernel from a large compact flash device)?
Compact Flash has been done by others, and in a couple of weeks I'll be able to share my experiences. I think you'll need a parallel flash chip. Although the 834x can retrieve its HRCW info from an I2C EEPROM, I don't know of any way to put the bootloader there. Not to mention that I2C EEPROMS are typically very small and slow. You can store your environment info in the I2C EEPROM, though.
- Is it possible to connect to u-boot's "console" from an enet port
or can it only be accessed from a serial port? If it can, I presume it can then be used to load new versions of u-boot just like the serial port? (The reason for this is there may not be a serial port available in the final design for the customer to use for field upgrades and we're concerned about being able to upgrade u-boot if we need to ship a fix for it in the future.)
There may be some tricks that others can share, but I'm not aware of any telnet or other network login servers that have been ported. There's no reason you couldn't upgrade U-boot through Linux (or whatever) if you use an MTD-supported parallel flash chip.
Before Wolfgang chimes in - careful with the HTML and 'Confidentiality' junk in your e-mail. You'll make few friends that way.
cheers, Ben