[U-Boot] uboot and ZFS

Jorgen Lundman lundman at lundman.net
Wed May 2 05:20:19 CEST 2012


Sorry if I am posting some kind of FAQ here,

I recently picked up a Cubox (arm) which uses uboot. Added ZFS to Linux and 
made it have a ZFS root filesystem. The only drawback is the small boot 
partition of ext2/fat to read uImage and initrd.

So I am curious about adding ZFS support to uboot. Looking at the sources 
http://git.denx.de/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=u-boot.git;a=tree
in particular, the ext2 work, I see it was once imported from GRUB.

Comparing that with 
https://github.com/pendor/grub-zfs/tree/master/grub-core/fs/zfs which is a 
fork for ZFS support to GRUB.

At first glance, it would suggest that it should be feasible to add ZFS to 
uboot. But since I only have 'usage-level knowledge' of both boot systems, 
I am unaware of any show-stoppers.

Perhaps memory/object-size is an issue? The ext2 code is some ~1100 lines 
in uboot, but ZFS is 2700 lines in GRUB. Or any of a thousand other issues 
I am unaware about.

Anyone already attempted such a project? Any resources available for such 
porting? Will I even be able to run my own version of uboot on the Cubox?

Lund


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