Hey! This is a followup to Debian http://bugs.debian.org/584166
This bug was originally filed against uboot-mkimage which used to provide the mkimage command in Debian. uboot-mkimage was a "fork" of u-boot and we now have upstream u-boot in Debian instead; mkimage is in a new u-boot-tools binary package built from the u-boot source package. On Wed, Jun 02, 2010, Thibaut GIRKA wrote: > Some versions of U-Boot (especially the one in the OpenMoko Freerunner > NOR) are broken and don't handle multi-file images the right way. > Multi-file images are U-Boot images with a table of sizes (size of the several > files), then the abovementionned files, aligned to multiples of 4 bytes. > Some broken versions of U-Boot expect a 4-byte padding for already aligned > files. Before we dive into the fix, let me try to summarize: * original (old) u-boot found in OpenMoko Freerunner flash had a bug * this bug has been fixed, and only people running the original u-boot binary suffer from it It is also my understanding that the recommended bootloader for Freerunner is Qi and not u-boot. The Freerunner appers to still be on sale, are new phones shipped with a broken u-boot? When users get their Freerunner, do they typically get a firmware update which will flash a new bootloader (Qi or u-boot)? As I understand it, it's really easy to flash u-boot on a Freerunner, and while it's not something we should be done lightly, it seems to have been done in a relatively safe way, and there is only a little chance that you would brick your hardware. My preference would be for Debian to: * communicate on this u-boot bug and point at Qi/updated u-boot binaries and at http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/NeoTool to flash it (we should package it?) * either provide a standalone mini-image which will just upgrade u-boot to a recent and corrected version * or fix installer images for Freerunner to be built using the workaround described in the bug report (padding the image before passing it to mkimage) Possibly a third way to address this would be if the Freerunner can load the bootloader from e.g. serial or SD, bypassing the flash one? If that's the case, we could provide installer media using a recent and corrected u-boot. I'm very much against working around bugs in old u-boot binaries permanently in mkimage, and I don't think there is any chance of upstream taking such a patch; even less so with a new command-line flag. We could also have a trivial freerunner-mkimage wrapper achieving the same thing, but again, I very much dislike these options. Cheers, -- Loïc Minier -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
