On Wed, Sep 08, 2010, Wolfgang Denk wrote: > zImage does not contain any visible information about what it is, > when it was build, etc. It is not checksum protected so you cannot > verify if the image you just downloaded is good enough to erase what > you have in flash, etc. etc.
These are indeed nice features of uImages (checksums + build date information); but they are not needed in all use cases for U-Boot. Distributions are shipping zImage for ARM nowadays and when shipping zImage files withing packages (.deb for instance), there are already checksums, file timestamps, public build logs etc. as part of the distro toolkit. Also, this means end-user systems need mkimage installed (because uImage differ slightly across boards). Not a problem for an embedded developer obviously, but would prefer avoiding this need on an end-user system. (Nitpick: if you want an accurate time for the kernel build, them this should rather be recorded during the upstream linux kernel build rather than at the time the uImage is created, which could be quite some time later!) > > Seems zImage is quite widespread now; would it make sense to allow > > builing u-boot without that code and rely on the kernel code to unpack? > Why duplicating the stuff again and again and again? Well, I'm proposing skipping one copy ;-) the U-Boot one > > Or should u-boot just gain a new image type for zImage? > Why not use uImage like we do with other architectures? > Why is it that ARM always has to try to reinvent the wheels? Eh, zImage has been around for a while! I guess it's just that we don't /need/ the couple extra uImage features, and would rather ship zImage directly. It would also remove the need for maintaining the table of magic values for uImage / uInitrd generation; a problem I described recently on another list: http://lists.linaro.org/pipermail/linaro-dev/2010-August/000493.html So we'd be happy if you'd take patches to have U-Boot accept this "dumber" format. Cheers, -- Loïc Minier _______________________________________________ U-Boot mailing list U-Boot@lists.denx.de http://lists.denx.de/mailman/listinfo/u-boot
