[U-Boot-Users] RFC: Booting the Linux/ppc64 kernel without Open Firmware HOWTO (#2)

Wolfgang Denk wd at denx.de
Thu May 19 23:18:39 EST 2005


Dear Ben,

in message <1116478614.918.75.camel at gaston> you wrote:
> 
> And here is a second draft with more infos.
> 
>            Booting the Linux/ppc64 kernel without Open Firmware

Thanks a lot for taking the initiative to come to an agreement  about
the kernel boot interface.

I have some concerns about the memory foot print and  increased  boot
time  that  will  result  from  the proposed solution. There are many
embedded systems where resources are tight and requirements are  aven
tighter.  It  would  be probably a good idea to also ask for feedback
from these folks - for example by posting your RFC on the celinux-dev
mailing list.

But my biggest concern is that we  should  try  to  come  up  with  a
solution  that  has  a  wider  acceptance. Especially from the U-Boot
point of view it is not exactly nice that each of  PowerPC,  ARM  and
MIPS  use  their very own, completely incompatible way of passing in-
formation from the boot loader to the kernel.

As is, your proposal will add just another incompatible way of  doing
the  same  thing  (of course we will have to stay backward compatible
with U-Boot to allow booting older kernels, too).


Why don't we try to come up with a solution that is acceptable to the
other architectures as well? 

Maybe you want  to  post  the  RFC  to  lkml,  or  at  least  to  the
linux-arm-kernel and linux-mips mailing lists?

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

-- 
Software Engineering:  Embedded and Realtime Systems,  Embedded Linux
Phone: (+49)-8142-66989-10 Fax: (+49)-8142-66989-80 Email: wd at denx.de
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are so long they can't afford the disk space.



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