Hi Frank,

On 07/04/2014 15:49, Frank Ihle wrote:

Hi U-Boot,

you recently gave me the hint about the Falcon Mode for my Fast Booting investigations. But I think might got it wrong, could somebody correct me if so?:

• According to the "Falcon Mode" Pdf of October 2013

(http://www.denx.de/wiki/pub/U-Boot/MiniSummitELCE2013/2013-ELCE-U-Boot-Falco...) The Falcon mode is just about to chose 2 different execution modes during startup - one that starts Linux directly (and skips u-boot) and the other for instance to make updates, or failsafe mode (and starts u-boot). Or does it even contain more functionality ?

The second starts U-Boot as you are used to.

• According to the "Minimizing boot times using U-Boot Falcon Mode"

Pdf of July 2012 (http://schedule2012.rmll.info/IMG/pdf/LSM2012_UbootFalconMode_Babic.pdf) it's mentioned that this can only run with boards, which are able to work with SPL. I guess here SPL means Second Programm Bootloader. I'm not an expert in this area, but wouldn't it be possible to run every board with an SPL, since it's just Software like a Bootloader?

Of course, but not all boards supported in mainline were converted to use SPL, and for this reason not all boards support out of the box Falcon Mode.

And if not what is the "real" eye of the needle here ? I'm just asking because I didn't get the problem here.

It is simply a snapshot of the current U-Boot mainline. The switch between Linux/U-Boot is implemented in SPL, and this makes sense because SPL is much smaller that the whole U-Boot, dropping also the time that a SOC needs to load an image from the storage media.

Best regards, Stefano Babic