[Just now checking the cross-distro folder, oops]
On 08/05/2013 05:03 PM, Brendan Conoboy wrote:
On 08/05/2013 01:45 PM, Stephen Warren wrote:
I took a quick look at Fedora's arm-boot-config package. It seems like it's approach is to detect which U-Boot is present, then create a boot.scr that will work with it. This script will be different on different boards due to the differences in U-Boot features etc. The approach I was assuming was that for distros to support a board, you'd need a recent upstream U-Boot with certain features enabled (this is going to be true even if we all go enable PXE support...), hence the same boot.scr could be used anywhere, hence most of a-b-c could be radically simplified down to a single code-path. Then, I think the only thing missing would be some interactive menu stuff to choose which kernel to boot.
Not exactly. Arm-boot-config generates a single boot.scr that will run on any supported board. The first stage of the boot.scr detects the kind of board it's running on and sets things up accordingly (Do I have bootz? What's a good kernel load address? Do I need to load a dtb? What IO devices should I scan for loading the kernel? etc). After it's figured that out it looks through its list of kernels and boots the most recent one with a matching dtb. It also generates crude menus ("run menu" etc). It's not pretty, but it works well enough to allow us to distribute a single disk image with multiple that boots on a variety of platforms. As the author, I fully supported Dennis's initiative to make it obsolete as soon as humanly possible: It is vastly preferable to get consensus amongst the distributions. How to turn that into working with all the hardware makers is is to my mind the more daunting prospect. Chain loading uboots comes to mind. ew.
Well, I think this is a solvable problem. Generally, vendors that want commodity support for their hardware work with the community to some degree. Providing both documentation and examples for "If you want most distros to work out of the box, you must.." should get traction.