Andy Green wrote:
On 02/08/11 10:25, Somebody in the thread at some point said:
andy, why don't you send this series to the xloader ML instead? is
that
supposed to be taken upstream or in a linaro version of xloader?
Hi Nicolas -
Well, from an outside perspective xloader is a bit difficult to find out how to interact with, I did not succeed to find out about any xloader mailing list (what are the coordinates of it?)
Here is the summary of my efforts to find xloader's home last night:
Its upstream appears to be here
https://gforge.ti.com/gf/project/bootloader/wiki/?pagename=X-Loader
but the latest stuff in the download link there is labelled "MLO-zoom2.v1.1" seemingly from 2009, and the version on my SD Card now reports
Texas Instruments X-Loader 1.41 (Oct 6 2010 - 17:27:48)
Going here in case linaro forked it
and searching for xloader x-loader MLO is dry.
I learn though that xloader sources are a sort of parasite on U-Boot sources. So looking here and searching for xloader
http://git.linaro.org/gitweb?p=boot/u-boot-linaro-next.git%3Ba=summary
there are grep hits on X-loader xloader and MLO but they appear unrelated.
http://pixhawk.ethz.ch/wiki/tutorials/omap/replace_xloader
points to angstrom to get a binary with no sources in sight.
Beagleboard forked it, although the fork seems Omap-3 specific from the name
http://gitorious.org/x-load-omap3
it does have Panda support.
I looked inside the hwpack tarball to see if I could get a clue under which name to find the sources, there is no separate Panda u-boot or X-loader package although u-boot-tools and uboot-mkimage are there.
I used dpkg -c to look in each .deb in the hwpack, but none contain a file called MLO which is the name of X-loader on the SD Card.
In the end I found
which had the advantage of working when I built it and yielding 1.44 version, so I cc'd the guy running that in the patches.
I'm sorry about the mess - I tried to unify all of this and started yet another fork that I'm hoping gets to be called as the mainline x-loader. ;)
This is the one - I've just received your patches on the x-loader mailing list, and will go apply them in a bit. I'm maintaining the tree in my spare time, and I usually wait a few days for people to comment first.
Here's the history and the current state:
- x-loader forked out of u-boot several years ago. It was supposed to be used as a minimal first-stage loader for some OMAP boot modes (NAND boot for instance), where we had a limit on the size of the binary that could execute from SRAM. - It was maintained internally for several years - with the beagleboard came several forks of the TI-released x-loader. - There was no effort to unify these, until recently.
- Currently supported boards are: - OMAP3 EVM - Beagle and BeagleXM - Overo (35xx and 37xx) - Pandaboard - OMAP4 Blaze (currently, Pandaboard MLO works, but I need to push explicit support for Blaze out) - Unsupported boards which I would like to support are - Zoom2, Zoom3, 3430 SDP, 3630 SDP, 3430 Zoom1 - Unsupported boards which have remnants of original code - 2420 h4, 2430 SDP, 3430 SDP, 3630 SDP, 3430 Zoom1
There are several forks out there - I'd love to gather up changes from the several different trees and merge them into the one I maintain. All I need is that someone sends a patch against the above tree (and if it's support for a new board, offers to help test patches for/maintain that board).
The roadmap for x-loader is this:
- There is ongoing work (from Aneesh and others) to build an x-loader equivalent out of u-boot. --- This is currently done for OMAP4 alone, but OMAP3 and others will take quite a while to get there. --- The size of the resultant binary is still quite big - there is ongoing work to cut this down. So there's still some way to go before we can get rid of x-loader completely
- I will maintain the x-loader tree as long as it is felt to be useful - The intent is to allow x-loader to boot up u-boot on as many platforms and in as many boot modes as people find useful. - New boards will be supported as long as someone helps verify the state of the x-loader tree on those boards from time to time --- (Existing board support files from other trees are also welcome. I would like to treat them the same way as new board files).
I haven't promoted the new x-loader much - I suppose most wiki pages including omappedia don't point to the new tree and mailing list. So far, we only did an announcement on linux-omap, beagle, panda, and u-boot mailing lists.
I'll go update a few obvious places (elinux.org, omappedia) where people look for info on x-loader, but feel free to suggest other places, or update wikis directly.
- Anand