[U-Boot] uboot and ZFS

[Marek Vasut]

Dear Jorgen Lundman,

> 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.

Oh please study this and submit a patch, I believe at least Pavel (CCed) would 
be glad to see it in :-)

> 
> 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.

Well the porting might be quite a long run indeed, but basic booting from this 
should not be that hard. Besides the code would be fairy separate, so it should 
be OK.

> 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?

I don't know, sorry.
> 
> Lund

Best regards,
Marek Vasut