[U-Boot-Users] [PATCH] Pass full u-boot environment to booting kernel

[Wolfgang Denk]

In message <41484664.20509 at intracom.gr> you wrote:
>
> IMHO it's better to have something now that works adequately than wait
> for the best solution which may be some years away.

OK. But then let's implement something that at least has a chance  of
being  accepted widely, and that actually solves the problems instead
of creating new ones.

What's your  opinoin  about  implementing  Mark  A.  Greer's  bi_recs
proposal instead?

> There's a need and this thing covers it. I'd be more than happy to

No. It causes additional problems that are not easy to solve.

> > Trying  to  do  the  same in the U-Boot environment would blow up the
> > environment and easily overflow it on most systems. Also parsing  and
> > decoding  the  ASCII  representation  would  slow down the Linux boot
> > process too much. Also  the  output  of  a  "printenv"  would  become
> > unreadable, etc.
> 
> Obviously systems that don't need it, won't enable it.

If your proposal works  as  intended,  it  may  become  the  satndard
interface to pass information to the kernel, so it should work on all
systems.  Also,  maybe  I  _need_  this  on a system with just a 2 kB
EEPROM. What will I do then? In  such  a  situation  the  environment
space is usually tight already now. And remember that the RAM copy of
the  environment  is not bigger than the persistent copy (and this is
intentionally, because otherwise you run into trouble when trying  to
"saveenv").

> And I don't think that searching the environment for a couple of variables
> is going to be a perceptible slowdown.

No matter how much it is, it is  wasted  effort.  There  are  systems
where each millisecond is precious.

> I'm open to suggestions.

See above. What about Mark's proposal? And what shall we do with  the
OCP stuff?

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

-- 
Software Engineering:  Embedded and Realtime Systems,  Embedded Linux
Phone: (+49)-8142-4596-87  Fax: (+49)-8142-4596-88  Email: wd at denx.de
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