[U-Boot] [PATCH v2 3/3] image: Allow images to indicate they're loadable at any address

[Nicolas Pitre]

On Tue, 8 Nov 2011, Jason wrote:

> It sounds like you are intending for distributions to provide uImages.
> Why can't they provide a generic zImage, and a post-install hook runs
> mkimage to add the board specific uImage header?  Similar to update-grub
> on x86{_64}.  This seems _more_ flexible to me, and fitting with
> standard conventions distributions are accustomed to.

That means also distributing, and more importantly maintaining, a list 
of boards and their particular requirements.  Or, alternately, digging 
into the u-Boot environment to figure out that information which is 
fragile and certainly more complex than not having to do this operation 
at all.

Standard conventions for distributions currently mean to simply drop the 
kernel in a known location and let the bootloader load it without any 
special wrapping.  Given that they already handle grub config files, 
having the same config format used on ARM would certainly make things 
even more "conventional".

Maybe we could port grub2 to be executed on top of u-Boot as a second 
stage bootloader?


Nicolas