Does anyone tftpboot the userspace image?

[Cédric Le Goater]

Hello, 

On 01/21/2017 11:10 AM, Mine wrote:
> Hi Xo,
> 
> 
> On Sat, Jan 21, 2017 at 9:59 AM, Xo Wang <xow at google.com> wrote:
>> Hi folks,
>>
>> I noticed from this discussion
>> https://lists.ozlabs.org/pipermail/openbmc/2016-April/thread.html#2738
>> that kernel developers were tftpbooting the userspace image from a
>> obmc-phosphor-image-<machine>.cpio.lzma.u-boot file.
>>
>> 1. How does/did that work? I guess you needed a custom init in the
>> initrd to load the u-boot container (?) instead of from mtd?
> 
> In uboot, we can use tftp to load the kernel and initrd to specific address,
> and use `bootm` command to start the kernel.
> E.g. for witherspoon:
> tftp 0x80001000 kernel
> tftp 0x81000000 initrd
> bootm 0x80001000 0x81000000

yes. There is nothing more to do to use these images. Just replace
initrd by obmc-phosphor-image-$platform.cpio.lzma.u-boot

>>
>> 2. Are you still using this? Building the extra .cpio.lzma.u-boot is
>> kind of slow, with an extra ~45 seconds to do 'find | cpio | lzma;
>> mkimage' every build, and it can't be parallelized.
> 
> I believe someone uses this, since it does not require to flash the image to
> the NOR flash, and make it easier to test new build.

yes. You can also use it to test an older build to check for 
regressions or to restore a system that was trashed by a buggy 
kernel. I have used it a few times and I still do to boot 
openbmc-1.0 images. It would be nice to keep these images. 

Thanks,

C.