Robert Thorhuus wrote:
Sorry. But this is were I disagree with you. Of course its prime function is to boot an operating system. And usually in a desktop environment that is what you need. But if you have newly developed hardware it is very seldom everything works all the time. There are a lot of debugging hardware sessions before you have stable hardware. So in embedded systems I would say U-Boot can very well be a primary choice of testing platform in the beginning of a development. Mainly because sucessfully booting U-Boot demands less of the hardware than sucessfully boot an OS. Say you have a NOR and 1 MB L3 cache but no DDR3, U-Boot is set, OS not.
If you really want to turn U-Boot into a testing platform, feel free to post patches that implement those features. But don't be surprised if your patches are rejected.
And what test platform would you suggest? And what if your extended testing needs to be a viable option at every boot and that you have boot time requirements?
You can create U-boot "applications" that test your hardware, if you want to test from within U-Boot.