[U-Boot] [ANNOUNCE] Kconfig support

[Sascha Hauer]

On Sun, Apr 19, 2009 at 04:59:41PM -0500, Kumar Gala wrote:
>
> On Apr 19, 2009, at 2:48 PM, Robert Schwebel wrote:
>
>> On Sat, Apr 18, 2009 at 08:54:41PM +0200, Wolfgang Denk wrote:
>>> u-boot-v2 is an interesting approach in several aspects, but since it
>>> was made publicly visible nearly two years ago it did not collect  
>>> much
>>> of a community around it.
>>
>> Right; part of the reason is it was always something we used to solve
>> our problems, and we didn't do much marketing around it. Nevertheless,
>> it *does* solve our problems very well, and each time we have to work
>> with v1 again it's weaknesses show up again and again.
>
> What's the summary of features that v2 has that v1 doesnt?

- Kconfig support
- Linux Build support
- Clean device registration and driver matching, so there can always be
  multiple instances of a device
- filesystem support. U-Boot starts by mounting a ramfs on /, populating
  a devfs under /dev and load the environemt to /env. Use the normal
  commands like cd, ls, rm, cat,...
- mount: there is no mmc_ls and mmc_load and stuff like that. Just mount
  your device and use ls
- The environment is not limited to a variable store, instead it's a
  ramfs which can store variables, scripts, splashimages or whatever
- module support
- One image for all storage types. Well, the hardware has to support it,
  but on i.MX27 the same image can start from RAM, Nor Flash and NAND
  Flash.
- USB Network support
- A network phy device layer, so phys are handled in a generic way.
  Their registers can be showed with md -s /dev/phy0 (and of course
  changed with mw)
- A much simpler clock implementation (Linux clocksource). So basically
  what an architecture needs to do is to specify the timer resolution
  and provide a read_timer function which returns the raw timer value.
- getopt support, so there is no need for positional arguments
- A simple editor to edit scripts
- readline usable on the command line to allow for interactive scripts
- a sandbox port to run U-Boot on the host including tap ethernet
- different bugs to hunt for

Sascha


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