On 02/08/11 12:48, Somebody in the thread at some point said:
Hi -
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.
That's correct, but Qi has full ATAGS and initrd support, it won't be difficult to take or rework U-Boot's devicetree in as well. The bootloader side will be a lot simpler than the kernel side since it's just passing the right blob along.
U-Boot has traditionally been used "in development" but especially on boards with SD Boot there are limited scenarios where its "more than load and boot" features, like shells and 5 second delays on every boot are actually useful.
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
http://git.warmcat.com/cgi-bin/cgit/qi/
Currently the lpc branch is most up to date but Matt also proposed merging all the support back into our master when he has done Panda, so I will wait to move it on until that is done.
-Andy