[U-Boot-Users] uploading OS over network instead of u-boot do wnloading it from a server.

[Brian S. Park]

>It might be a good idea that you explain how your users handle your
>board; in which cases is it important that the board is powered on
>_before_ the upload program was started?

There is no important technical reason. It's just one more thing for the 
user to remember.


> > With TFTP client approach, I need to set the serverip environmental
> > variable to IP of PC with the TFTP server. If I move the controller to
> > another room, and found out that the PC with TFTP server is not powered 
> up,
> > I need to either change the serverip variable to the new PC I intended to
> > use or go back to the other room and power up the PC. :)
>
>Or you can use DHCP/BOOTP to find your host pc (a dhcp server could be
>included in the upload program as well). Ok - this might find your
>company's DHCP server instead of your upload program, but that could
>surely be fixed with some special DHCP option and a small u-boot shell
>script which checks for the "correct" magick string.

The idea is to make it as simple as possible for the users to set it up using
as little flash memory as possible.
I still think things could be simpler if boot loader can act as the server
and receive the OS image.

As to whether it's worth the trouble to implement such feature, I no not have
an opinion one way or the other since I'm not familiar with 
bootloader/network stuff.

Maybe when I become more familiar with u-boot & tftp protocol, I'll 
implement such feature
as my contribution to open source community. :)

Thanks to every one for the comments and opinions.

Brian


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Brian S. Park  brian at corelis.com  (562) 926-6727 x143
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