Hi Tom, On 21 May 2014 10:46, Tom Rini <tr...@ti.com> wrote: > On Wed, May 21, 2014 at 10:10:50PM +0200, Wolfgang Denk wrote: >> Dear Tom Rini, >> >> In message <20140521195824.GE1752@bill-the-cat> you wrote: >> > >> > Something that Rob mentioned to me at ELC, and others have mentioned >> > before is that it would be nice if 'bootm' (which says "boot application >> > image stored in memory" in the help, even) would just work with zImage >> > or Image or whatever is spit directly out of the kernel. >> >> I don;t think this is a good idea. "application image" is supposed to >> mean "one of the U-Boot image formats", which means the old legacy >> image format (with the 64 byte header), or FIT images. To boot a >> zImage file, we have the "bootz" command. > > Yes, it's historically meant something with an essentially (technically > no, practically, yes) U-Boot centric header on it. But that's not what > the help text says. And yes we have bootz for zImages and I added booti > for Image images. That resulted in "You mean I have to type different > things for arm and arm64? *sigh*" when explaining this in person. > >> I also think such a patch is pushing into the wrong direction. We >> should rather try and improve the kernel support for FIT images. > > That's neither here nor there. You can create and boot FIT images > today, anywhere it's enabled (including arm64). You can do the same > with legacy images (which also resulted in sighs when I mentioned this). > The kernel doesn't want any of this in the kernel tree. Developers want > to have as few steps between "build my kernel" and "now I'm testing my > kernel". Adding in "create / grab stub FIT file, run mkimage" results > in more unhappy developers.
Unless I'm imagining it, some years ago I could type 'make fit_image' or similar for the kernel and get an image ready to boot. Did someone remove that feature from Linux and expect the number of steps needed to build a kernel to stay the same? It surprises me the lengths to which people are going to try to shoehorn .dtbs, compression, multiple dtbs, multi-arch etc. into the kenel zImage format. The decompression header is ugly, plus it is slower than doing these things in U-Boot. Regards, Simon _______________________________________________ U-Boot mailing list U-Boot@lists.denx.de http://lists.denx.de/mailman/listinfo/u-boot
