On 02/08/11 11:50, Somebody in the thread at some point said:
Hi -
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.
Sure, thanks. I guess we help make it the upstream the more we keep feeding google links to your repo ^^
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.
What we did for Qi was order the code carefully via linkerscript so that the steppingstone / SRAM part was at the start of a single image, which went on to have the remainder. Since where the ROM got the first part is mandated by the ROM specific to the CPU, Qi for that CPU knows where to go to get the rest of itself into SDRAM. So, it's the equivalent of a single-image xloader + U-Boot. Typical Qi is only 28KBytes including SD / Ext2 / VFAT.
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
Another difference with Qi is that we got rid of compile-time config. There is a single Qi image built per CPU, and it detects at runtime which device it is running on.
- 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.
I can really recommend booting Linux directly as does Qi. In the context that U-Boot is "the OS", albeit temporarily, it only has disadvantages compared to Linux except the size (and they're working on that ^^) That also goes for "backup" / "debrick" scenarios.
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.
Well I turned to Google so I guess feeding that from a few different directions will help.
TI also need to nuke or redirect that gforge.ti.com page, it obviously was official but is now dead.
-Andy