[fedora-arm] ARM and shipping of various binary firmware / boot bits

[Dennis Gilmore]

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On Thu, 08 Mar 2012 13:12:39 -0500
Jon Masters <jcm at redhat.com> wrote:

> On 03/08/2012 01:07 PM, Jon Masters wrote:
> 
> > Anyway. All this means that on ARM, in some cases (won't be true on
> > servers), especially inexpensive dev boards, we become the
> > distributor of the U-Boot bits if we want to ship whole SD Card
> > images (which we think we do - otherwise installation on Panda or
> > Pi becomes harder, on servers and other systems we'll do x86-like
> > Anaconda and PXE later). I think we could build U-Boot ourselves,
> > especially in the case of boards where we can't brick them just by
> > having a bad build. Generally, I don't want to distribute "BIOS"
> > code in the longer term beyond those cases where we need to shove
> > something on an SD Card image by nature of the way that the cards
> > boot. In other cases, I prefer we don't build or ship something,
> > e.g. for U-Boot where it is shipped in flash on the board or in
> > cases where we might be able to brick a board.
> 
> So I can get behind (reluctantly) us building e.g. a uboot package
> with subpackages for e.g. OMAP boards like Panda, Beagle, etc. and
> then pulling in the result. Since we're constraining the number of
> "whole disk" images we want to make (these are an installation
> convenience) we can keep the set of U-Boot bits we actually build
> fairly small. If someone has a funky board, then can put this stuff
> together. Until we get to the future bigger ARM systems, where this
> is a non-issue.
> 
> Jon.

while a bit ugly 
http://ausil.us/packages/x-loader-1-1.fc15.src.rpm
http://ausil.us/packages/x-loader.spec

and a binary compiled version 
http://ausil.us/packages/x-loader-1-1.fc15.armv7hl.rpm

ive not yet tested that the built versions will actually load uboot to
boot a system

it builds and packages up the MLO x-load.bin x-load.bin.ift for the
supported boards from the git tree at
git://gitorious.org/x-loader/x-loader.git

two of the boards failed to build. likely this will need a little work
still and we probably only want to build the beagle and panda board
versions since they are hardware we intend to support.

But the raspberry pi is a different beast and will likely need the
board to grant an exception.

Dennis
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