On Tue, Feb 08, 2011, Andy Green wrote:
Actually FWIW I was talking to my friend Matt Hsu at 0xlabs yesterday, he did an Omap 3 port of Qi bootloader and told he is working on a Pandaboard / OMAP 4 port this week.
cool!
To the extent that the bootloader is just there to load and boot Linux the current system of xloader and U-Boot is wasteful in several domains at once but most especially boot time when combined with a big initrd like it is at the moment.
This is certainly an interesting perspective for production images; for Linaro, I think we're exclusively using u-boot for now, which allows for some simplifications and gives developers a rather featureful bootloader which is suitable for the development stage (and granted, might not always be small or fast enough for production). Consider for instance DeviceTree support: it's available in u-boot, and I'd be surprized if it was also available in Qi.
Maybe a lightweight BSD-licensed bootloader will be on our agenda in future cycles, but it's not a priority right now
That said, if it's available and working, we could offer if as an alternative for interested people (I would guess on a best effort basis, non-official etc.)
Do you have pointers to the source and usage instructions? :-) maybe a Linaro wiki page might make sense