[U-Boot] [U-Boot-Users] TFTP server support in U-boot

[santosh pattar]

Dear Ben,

Thank you very much for the suggestion. Actually i could able to get
the TFTP server up in u-boot. This Server wont run in the background
all the time. The senario is like this, Board comes up and checks for
validation of the image on the flash. If the validation fails it
switches to the server mode that is its in the listening mode. If any
read/write (RRQ/WRQ) requests come to the board, it services them and
as you suggested if complete/done command(file) comes it switches from
server mode and continues with the regular operation.

Now i am able to service Read and write operations which come from
TFTP client(PC based) .But this needs still lot of testing and
validation. Can we make this as part of u-boot main line release?
please let me know your views.

And if you say yes , we can make this as part of u-boot main line
release then i would need help from your side in finding out the
different test cases to test this fully.

Thank you very much for your suggestion.

Regards,
santosh


On 12/16/08, Jerry Van Baren <gerald.vanbaren at ge.com> wrote:
> Ben Warren wrote:
>> Hello Santosh,
>>
>> santosh pattar wrote:
>>> Dear All,
>>>
>>> As of now in the U-boot only TFTP client is supported. I am planning
>>> to have TFTP server support in the u-boot. Can you please help me in
>>> this regarding?
>>>
>>> Please provide me few links if this has been done already, or links
>>> from where i can take some information and start working on it.
>>>
>>>
>> I believe this has come up before, so search the mail archives.  I don't
>> remember anybody posting a patch, though.  In general, U-boot doesn't
>> 'serve', so you have quite a bit of work to do.  Luckily, TFTP is one of
>> the more trivial protocols, hence the name.
>
> Do search the archives because my memory isn't what it used to be, but I
> don't recall a TFTP server coming up.  Periodically FTP support comes up
> and then silently disappears when the requester figures out how much
> work it would be.  Despite sharing 3/4 of the characters and supporting
> the same concept, TFTP and FTP are totally different animals.
>
>> I'm curious why you want to do this.  People generally use U-boot as
>> transient software for loading operating systems that are much more
>> suitable for serving images.  Do you have a situation where you have
>> several identical devices and want to reduce the upstream network load?
>> In that case, you may want to look into the multicast TFTP instead.
>>
>> regards,
>> Ben
>
> If you really need this, I would suggest adding a simple (modal) "tftp
> server" command so that, when you execute the command all u-boot is
> doing is TFTP server work until something indicates "done" (e.g. a file
> was successfully transfered) and then the command exits.  This would fit
> well into the u-boot restricted architecture that is characterized by
> being single threaded with no tasking.
>
> Trying to do a full fledged tftp server that runs independently in the
> background is going to be a lot harder because there is no "background"
> in u-boot.
>
> Best regards,
> gvb
>