quans...@quanstro.net: > u-boot has several drawbacks that have hindered my development > ... > i worked on an embedded pcie endpoint, and all these factors cost > me 4-5 weeks of dev time, time enough that i could have brought the > board up myself directly with plan 9 as a bootloader in tht amount of > time.
One of the functions u-boot performs is configuring the various subsystems in the SoC (individual clocks and power settings for subcomponents, gpio pin functions, ...) -- things a BIOS would do in a more old-timey computer. In my experience these are typically undocumented (or worse, incorrectly documented), so doing this initialisation in Plan 9 would require reverse engineering of u-boot to figure out what to do. It's easier just to be lazy and let u-boot do it.
