On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 10:26 PM, Stephen Warren swarren@wwwdotorg.org wrote:
On 02/20/2013 06:37 PM, Joel A Fernandes wrote:
Hello, I've been spinning some work-in-progress patches for FIT build support in the kernel. With the move to multiplatform support on OMAP, I feel it is a good time to add FIT support, also looking at the proliferating number of dtbs, as it is a nice way
To my mind, FIT is pointless. And forcing the kernel build process to
I don't think so, there are many usecases for FIT and cleanly embedding DTBs is a common usecase, (along with stronger checksums, compression). That is also the basis of my ELC talk tomorrow morning ;-) You could peruse the slides at, http://wwwelinux.org/Fit-boot to get a better understanding of what FIT solves. With the move to multiplatform kernels, it is quite a logical next step to add this support to the kernel build.
create bootloader-specific files doesn't seem like a good idea. Doing so would require pulling in even more outside tools into the kernel build flow.
As for pulling additional tools, dtc is already a part of the kernel so the idea is to use existing tools.
All you need is to copy the zImage and any relevant .dtb files into /boot, and have U-Boot load the relevant .dtb file by constructing the filename as roughly ${soc}-${board}.dtb, then use the bootz command to boot it. You can have a completely generic boot.scr (or built-in script).
FIT doesnt need any such bootloader variables and thus benefits from the simplicity.
Note: Not all (many?) U-Boot support FIT anyway, so you'd need to flash
For these boards, we can special case to doing a non-fit boot to keep them backward-compatibility. I don't think maintaining backward-compatibility requires any additional work, but just building the kernel with a different make target.
Regards, Joel