I am not sure if this is off-topic, because I'm unsure of the division of labor.
Is there any reason that U-Boot needs ATA support compiled in? I ask because I'm trying to speed up booting on a small system with a hard drive. U-Boot waits for the devices to become available, scanning the ATA bus, before proceeding to load the Linux kernel. It appears to me that the kernel then does the same thing again, whereas if it went ahead and went straight to loading the kernel, it would give the drive another second or two to spin up and be ready for a bus scan.
Given that the kernel is being loaded out of flash (with all drivers compiled in), and that the only reference to the IDE drive that U-Boot really knows about is a commandline parameter passed to the kernel, would it cause any conspicuous problems to remove ATA support from U-Boot, or does the kernel depend on hardware information that U-Boot is providing (I notice there's a "U-Boot" section in the kernel config)?
Thanks, Victor Wren