[U-Boot-Users] Accessing mkimage checksum

[Wolfgang Denk]

In message <444FE313.2090609 at orkun.us> you wrote:
>
> We had the similar need to do this. In our software update program 
> (which gets executed via a custom CLI/Web layer etc.) we validate the 
> kernel+initrd in uimage format before storing in the flash. If 

Yes, of course. Thisi s a perfectly valid request. But you don't need
no special tools for this. A simple "mkimage -l" will do this.

> We do this by calculating the crc of the header comparing with stored 
> header crc and if that checks calculating the data payload crc and 
> comparing it with the stored payload crc in the image header. libz 
> provides the necessary crc32() functionality in Linux.

You just reinvented another wheel.

> If you are not building images on the target mkimage is an overkill to 
> validate the image. As a matter of fact, we do not build a cross version 
> of this utility.

So how big is "mkimage" on your system? For PowerPC I get:

	-> ls -lh mkimage
	-rwxr-xr-x  1 wd users 18K Apr 27 00:26 mkimage

18 kB... How big is your custom application, and how much memory  did
you save?

> Please also consider that their is not enough space in the writable file 
> system so image is kept in ram by the update application until update is 
> completed. So, dependency on external utilities is not necessary or not 
> required.

If you can keep it in RAM, you could use a tmpfs and operate on files
as well. You probably could have used other standard  tools  then  as
well.

> Wolfgang, now my question is "image.h" file needed by the update 
> application and this file is GPL. Would you consider dual licensing this 
> file only so it could be included in such a proprietary closed-source 
> program?

No.  But please read the file header again, more carefully.

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

-- 
Software Engineering:  Embedded and Realtime Systems,  Embedded Linux
Phone: (+49)-8142-66989-10 Fax: (+49)-8142-66989-80 Email: wd at denx.de
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