On 17:30 Wed 19 Oct , Grant Likely wrote:
On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 8:14 AM, Jean-Christophe PLAGNIOL-VILLARD plagnioj@jcrosoft.com wrote:
On 23:20 Tue 18 Oct , Grant Likely wrote:
On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 10:44 PM, Jean-Christophe PLAGNIOL-VILLARD
- Investigate implementing signed images a la secure boot. Need to
investigate existing secure boot formats and policies so we don't do something gratuitously different.
I don't disagree with the FIT image topics, but I'm not including them in this list of recommendations because they don't have much bearing on the task of working out ARM server infrastructure.
They are usefull to have in one image multple kernel/dtb/initrd
Yes it is for many embedded use cases. However, for the server use case the distribution vendors are pretty much needing separate kernel and initrd images since pretty much all their infrastructure is set up to work in that mode on x86.
So take a look on my proposal of the boot menu with DTB as input
Effectively, there isn't much functional difference between the dtb proposal and using a subset of the grub configuration format. Given the choice, I'd rather use an existing config file format instead of creating a new file format. Also, for config files, plain text is certainly more accessible for reading and editing than the dtb tokenized form.
Except for the botloader binary size, we will have to support the DTB parser anyway
and for grub they do the same in grub2 they have a text configl file that they "compile" for grub. So with a DTB we do not need to add new source code in the bootloader.
The second advantage of the DTB is that libfdt is GPL or BSD so can be used in propriaritary bootloader or code
Best Regards, J.