Chris Morgan wrote:

...

Here at Bose we've measured a significant delay in the time it takes to initialize ethernet on the MPC5121, a delay of ~2 seconds. I've seen the same delay on the MPC5200 with u-boot 1.1.3. Currently we are using the mpc5121 ads version of u-boot from Freescale, based on 1.2.0.

If Wolfgang is ok with not initializing the hardware before use then doesn't that fit with holding off the ethernet initialization until there is a function call in the code that requires accessing ethernet? We aren't using any boot commands that use networking so while we have ethernet enabled in our board configuration for debug and flashing it isn't necessary in most boot situations. If initialization on demand of the ethernet device was acceptable we could probably have someone work on a patch to do so. Just want to get approval that the idea is sane and acceptable for inclusion in u-boot, if properly implemented.

Chris

We're using an MPC5200 with U-Boot 1.1.5. If I set the environment variable skipnetcheck=y the ethernet check is skipped until it is needed, for instance when using tftp. The code is in lib_ppc/board.c. If it is available in your code you could try if it suits your need. One thing to have in mind though is that after Linux is up and running you have to initialize the hardware. I think a ping from your board to an external ip-address is ok. Someone maybe have a better idea how to do this?

Mattias