Stefan Roese wrote:
Hi Behan,
Hey Stefan.
On Tuesday 17 July 2007, Behan Webster wrote:
mkimage is used for building kernel images (and other related things like ramdisk images).
And it is being used for building other images too. Not only Linux kernel images but other OS images (VxWorks, QNX, etc.), FPGA images, bitmaps and so on. Everything related to U-Boot in a way. So the mkimage tool should at least be available in the U-Boot source tree.
I was unaware.
It was merely an idea to remove the "duplication of code" concern.
Lowering the barrier to entry to the use of u-boot (i.e. by allowing kernels to be more easily built for it) will encourage more to use it. More people using it will eventually lead to more people interested in learning about the code. It also cuts down on people asking a FAQ.
It also puts a tool in the kernel tree which encourages others to use u-boot as their boot loader. :)
It's a win-win solution.
I have to support you here, that it should be easier to "use" mkimage in the Linux kernel generation. But completely removing it from the U-Boot source doesn't make sense to me because of the reasons mentioned above.
Indeed.
The easiest change would be to add a make target to the U-Boot top-level Makefile, for mkimage generation. This way the Linux "user" would at least not have to worry about compiling U-Boot for a not needed platform.
This is the easiest and a good first step.
However, I agree with Josh that it's still strange that this is necessary step to build a kernel.
Of course, if mkimage is a seperable tool, then at the very least linux distributions can start to package it as a seperate tool. This is something that a lot of users have asked for from what I've seen.
If it is both easy to build mkimage by itself, and can be distributed as a package for the various distros, then most of this issue goes away.