[U-Boot] [PATCH v3] mpq101: initial support for Mercury Computer Systems MPQ101 board

Alex Dubov oakad at yahoo.com
Thu Jan 13 03:42:48 CET 2011


> > 
> > 1. I want to fit an environment and the bootloader
> into a single flash
> > sector.
> 
> This is a very bad idea as it will open a window brick your
> system at
> each and every "saveenv" command.
> 
> I strongly recommend not to do that.

This issue is well understood.
Yet, we are talking an industrial mezzanine card here, of variety which
is put into the (ups-backed in most cases) rack once and forgotten.

If it was a consumer or developer oriented device, I, of course, would
use a safer approach. From what I've seen, this is more or less in line
with many other boards already supported by u-boot.

> 
> If you stop doing 1., all other problems will just
> disappear.

Unfortunately, these boards have flash chips without small boot blocks,
and considering the nature of typical board usage (as described) vs
value of some additional flash space, I see it as a reasonable trade-off.

> 
> 
> If you really insist in such an unreliablke configuration,
> a custom
> linker script would IMO be better, as it would make the
> image layout
> more visible.

Typical ld script is rather largish with many details of no direct
relevance to any specific board. Single flag modifying the section offset
has the advantage of being concise and immediately visible.

I will, of course, look at it again.



      


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