[U-Boot] Need input: Use Virtual address in commands; add translation/physical

[Wolfgang Denk]

Dear Andrew,

In message <c166aa9f0811270906p6252c2b5m26adaeab4f154b89 at mail.gmail.com> you wrote:
>
> What about suicidal things like accessing a bus region that hangs the
> machine, hitting the one address that resets the whole thing?  Yes, I
> know that's broken design, but hardware like that exists, and is not
> going to change because we wish it so.

No, it's not broken design - it may even be intentional. 

And you may want to be able to test if the system really resets when
you write to that address - and U-Boot shall allow this.

U-Boot really shall allow you to do all things.

Remember that the U-Boot user is not the  average  Johnny  Loser  who
cannot write a signle line of code without all Eclipse and a bunch of
other  graphical  tools  on his system - U-Boot is for developers who
bring up new hardware.

>  I (sometimes) know what I'm doing, but I have customers who
> (sometimes) don't.

Such customers are not supposed to be allowed access  to  the  U-Boot
console,  right?  Or  they  need  adequate  training.  Would  you let
everybody in the cockpit of a A380?

> How about this - have a weak function or #ifdef/#endif to call out to
> a platform address checking routine (only on parsing an address, not
> every access), but only if an environment variable is set.  That would
> leave the default way of things, but allow people who are distributing
> u-boot to others to try and make their system a bit more robust.

That would be a restriction of the freedom of things you can do  with
U-Boot.  We didn't have anything like that for the last 8+ years, and
I still see no need for it.

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

-- 
DENX Software Engineering GmbH,     MD: Wolfgang Denk & Detlev Zundel
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