Hi Stephen,
Could you expand upon what "handles booting from extX directly" means? Upstream U-Boot has supported ext2/3 for as long as I've been involved with it (which admittedly isn't that long), and ext4 support was added recently. This allows U-Boot commands "extload" or "load" to access ext* just like any other file-system. Is there something more involved when you say "booting from extX directly" beyond just the extload/load commands?
Sorry, I meant loading the SPL, which in some of the boot scripts are loaded from FAT still.
I think it's reasonable to require that boards supported by generic distros have upgraded/recent U-Boots that export a standard set of environment variables that define the various addresses, so that boot.scr authors don't have to care about platform differences, but rather simply use those variables. For example, kernel_addr_r, ramdisk_addr_r, fdt_addr_r, etc.
Sure, no problems with that.
Greetings, Dirk