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On Wed, 7 Aug 2013 13:09:08 -0500 Matt Sealey neko@bakuhatsu.net wrote:
Define "transparently load".
omap systems have a findfdt command that gives you the dtb file name expected for the board. I expect that u-boot will know the name of the file for its dtb. Hardware vendors would have the choice of how they implement loading the dtb. They could load a dtb shipped in onboard storage or load one from our common dtb directory. The user or distro can specifiy that the distro dtb be used
Why wouldn't you just mandate that there are certain features enabled and that all platforms need a boot script - therefore abstracting the board name, dtb name, location, kernel version/naming scheme from the bootloader as a whole?
because we don't need a boot script. we as distros shouldn't need to worry about things like memory locations. we should only need to load a kernel, initramfs, and pass boot args. http://lists.denx.de/pipermail/u-boot/2013-August/160080.html is my proposal to u-boot upstream on defining a standard platform. you are free to use a boot script still, however I strongly feel that using a extlinux config with the sysboot command offers a much better user experience.
The location of that boot script would need to be agreed, and a standard search script if there is some variation (what if /boot isn't separate?)
Everything needs to work with both cases where /boot is seperate and where /boot is part of /
Dennis
On Mon, Aug 5, 2013 at 4:41 PM, Dennis Gilmore dennis@ausil.us wrote:
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Hi all,
As part of the unified features in u-boot thread I said that I would work to get distros to agree to a common location that u-boot will be able to assume exists for it to transparently load dtbs from for us.
I would like to propose /boot/dtb/
I think it needs to be in /boot/ to allow for booting from systems with / and /boot on separate partitions. I believe Ubuntu and hence Debian put them in /lib somewhere today. Fedora puts them in /boot/dtb-<kernel version>. im not sure where the other distros put them.
I think that until they are decoupled from the kernel Fedora would have /boot/dtb be a symlink to the latest installed kernel. once its decoupled it would be the location where the dtbs are installed.
Can We all agree to implement ensuing that dtb files will be available in /boot/dtb/