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

Robert Nelson robertcnelson at gmail.com
Fri Mar 9 02:54:19 UTC 2012


On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 12:57 PM, Dennis Gilmore <dennis at ausil.us> wrote:
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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

Ah, for the beagle/panda, you can drop the x-loader requirement.. As
of v2011.12, u-boot's SPL now builds a proper MLO file that replaces
the former MLO file from the X-Loader project, for these devices.. For
u-boot v2012.03 even more former only X-Loader devices have been
converted..

Just a note:

X-Loader:

MLO -> u-boot.bin -> kernel/etc..

u-boot SPL:

MLO -> u-boot.img -> kernel/etc..

Regards,

-- 
Robert Nelson
http://www.rcn-ee.com/


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