On 08/11/2014 11:51 AM, Jeroen Hofstee wrote:
Hello Stephan

On 11-08-14 18:53, Stephen Warren wrote:
On 08/10/2014 10:53 AM, Jeroen Hofstee wrote:
Hello Stephan,

On 10-08-14 05:11, Stephen Warren wrote:
The entire point of this series is to prevent distros from having to
install bootloader-specific boot configuration files.
>
I fail to see why this is something to pursue. Since the distro knows
the boot path, why should u-boot be polling all possible options?

This patch series allows U-Boot to find the OS and boot it. U-Boot is
searching for some kind of boot configuration file.

This part of the process is the same as the BIOS searching all known
possible boot devices for a partition marked bootable, and with a
valid MBR. Or, it's the same as UEFI searching all possible boot
devices for whatever config file or boot binary is mandated by UEFI.

Not in my mind, I am not against scanning the possible
boot devices, on the contrary, I am trying to add booting
the userland from usb instead of mmc for the rpi_b.

The following will tell U-Boot to only search USB for extlinux.conf.

setenv boot_targets usb

(you can put this into /uEnv.txt on the SD card if you want to avoid editing U-Boot source code to make this change; there's no persistent environment storage on the Pi, at least at the moment)

> The
part I dislike is where it starts searching for specific files.
The equivalent would be your BIOS actively searching for GRUB,
LILO, Windows Boot manager etc. etc. and as a fallback
try the MBR.
...
Once U-Boot locates extlinux.conf or boot.scr, that file encodes what
files (kernel, DTB, initrd)

This is the part I get for free now with it, I don't really like it,
since if we take this road it ends up looking for e.g. grub.conf,
ubldr.conf, vxworks.conf etc etc.

No, Linux distros need to be able to install a single bootloader configuration file to tell the bootloader how to boot. I definitely don't want to add support for a ton of other bootloader configuration file formats. There needs to be a single standard that distros know they can rely on.

Also in this case the downstream provides information back,
albeit tiny, it does indicate if it is bootable and a label to explain
what is bootable.

I don't understand what that means.
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