85xx FDT updates?

[Kumar Gala]

On Apr 25, 2006, at 11:49 AM, Dan Malek wrote:

>
> 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.

I understand this, however these systems are not in the kernel tree  
and thus we can only do so much for them.  I agree a shim between a  
non-flat dev tree aware u-boot and kernel would be a good thing.   
However, I don't see that as something I have to produce as a board  
maintainer if I can give you and updated u-boot to use.

- kumar