[U-Boot-Users] ATA driver in U-Boot

[Victor Wren]

I am not sure if this is off-topic, because I'm unsure of the division of 
labor.

Is there any reason that U-Boot needs ATA support compiled in?  I ask because 
I'm trying to speed up booting on a small system with a hard drive.  U-Boot 
waits for the devices to become available, scanning the ATA bus, before 
proceeding to load the Linux kernel.  It appears to me that the kernel then 
does the same thing again, whereas if it went ahead and went straight to 
loading the kernel, it would give the drive another second or two to spin up 
and be ready for a bus scan.

Given that the kernel is being loaded out of flash (with all drivers compiled 
in), and that the only reference to the IDE drive that U-Boot really knows 
about is a commandline parameter passed to the kernel, would it cause any 
conspicuous problems to remove ATA support from U-Boot, or does the kernel 
depend on hardware information that U-Boot is providing (I notice there's a 
"U-Boot" section in the kernel config)?

Thanks,
Victor Wren