[U-Boot-Users] MPC5121 (and MPC5200) ethernet initialization delay

[Chris Morgan]

Here at Bose we've measured a significant delay in the time it takes
to initialize ethernet on the MPC5121, a delay of ~2 seconds. I've
seen the same delay on the MPC5200 with u-boot 1.1.3. Currently we are
using the mpc5121 ads version of u-boot from Freescale, based on
1.2.0.

Is there a known requirement in the ethernet hardware or protocol that
requires this 2 second delay? Auto detection of speed or something?

Because we haven't been using ethernet to boot, only to program flash,
we've been able to eliminate the delay by moving the ethernet init
until after the user has pressed enter and broken into the shell. This
would naturally break bootcmds that used ethernet, like nfs or tftp
booting. If the delay is fixed due to hardware I'm wondering if it
would be acceptable to make the ethernet initialization occur on
demand when other code wanted to access the ethernet device?

Chris