[U-Boot-Users] Booting from ext2 partition

[Leon KUKOVEC]

Hi Wolfgang, Jerry,

On Tue, 2004-03-16 at 23:14, Wolfgang Denk wrote:

> * Use of FAT filesystems  for  changable  media  where  the  customer
>   insists that the storage device must be written on windoze systems.
>   Yes, there are such situations :-(

read-write FAT filesystem with couple of new FAT commands is comming
along. It's in it's late testing phase.

> > Recently a few of the folks on my team have asked me to implement a
> > loader that can load the kernel from an ext2 partition.  They say they
> 
> What good would that do to you, except for blowing up the size of U-Boot?

Our board will load a kernel from a dedicated FAT partition which will
be accessible in read-write mode from both, Linux and U-Boot. Sizewise,
u-boot.bin with PCMCIA, IDE, FAT (read-only) is 118452 bytes, with FAT
read-write it comes as 132516 bytes. (still inside one sector boundary
for our FLASH)

> > copy the kernel image.  The other reason given is that they do not want
> > to dedicate a block on the CompactFlash IDE drive to a "raw" partition

Create a FAT partition of 10MB to store kernel images and do NOT mount
it at startup unless you're upgrading a kernel from Linux.

> We're talking about yet another way to waste developer's time.

It's at least a two developer wish. ext2 is preety heavy, but FAT +
read-write is not that bad. The idea is to be able to store multiple
images for development purpose and of course for product upgrades.

-- 

Best Regards,
	Leon.