Dear Jorgen Lundman,
At first glance, it would suggest that it should be feasible to add ZFS to uboot. But since I only have 'usage-level knowledge' of both boot systems, I am unaware of any show-stoppers.
Oh please study this and submit a patch, I believe at least Pavel (CCed) would be glad to see it in :-)
Well the porting might be quite a long run indeed, but basic booting from this should not be that hard. Besides the code would be fairy separate, so it should be OK.
I took the existing CuBox u-boot, and compiled. Then found the EXT4 patches done by Siemens, and practised merging that in, compiling, and flashing the cubox. I can now boot EXT4. So that is encouraging.
Looking at GRUB zfs, it defines similar functions, namely open(), mount(), read(), close() and list(). So perhaps I can get something done. Is there quicker ways to test uboot than to flash the hardware every time?
If you correctly skip the HW init, you can try booting u-boot from u-boot ... (now, WD will hate me for bringing this up :-) ). It's possible, but unsupported operation. You might need to do some research on this matter :-)
What is the general patch acceptance around, I see ext4 wasn't accepted, what are the chances my patches would be?
Why wasn't ext4 accepted?
Lund
Best regards, Marek Vasut