85xx FDT updates?

[Dan Malek]

On Apr 25, 2006, at 3:49 AM, Eugene Surovegin wrote:

> It seems some people here lost touch with reality - embedded Linux is
> mostly run on custom hardware, not on evaluation boards.

This is the reason I usually mention such things.  While we all
want to see the new features, we have to be sensitive to the
real world product deployment of Linux.  While your world
may be a few evaluation boards that allow you to update
software many times a day, the real world products can't
afford to do that.  From my own experience, I can tell you
that none of the deployed systems I've worked on will
ever update U-Boot.  They consider this a sacred piece of
software such that is all else fails they can recover a
system remotely using U-Boot commands.  They won't
risk updating U-Boot in case it fails.  Making Linux dependent
on a particular, updated, version of U-Boot just isn't going
to work in most deployed systems.  Or worse, making
Linux dependent on U-Boot isn't necessarily popular
either.  For various reasons, especially when replacing
legacy software, some custom boot rom is often the
only choice.

Thanks.


	-- Dan