[U-Boot] Unified u-boot feature set for simpler distro support

[Stephen Warren]

On 08/05/2013 03:08 PM, Dennis Gilmore wrote:
> Hi Wolfgang,
> 
> On Mon, 05 Aug 2013 22:43:39 +0200
> Wolfgang Denk <wd at denx.de> wrote:
> 
>> Dear Dennis,
>>
>> In message <20130805145059.14c35ebf at adria.ausil.us> you wrote:
>>>
>>> right, but at the least it needs to be ext4 not all boards today
>>> read ext4, btrfs may be something down the road also. u-boot doesnt
>>> need to care too much. it just needs to look in / and /boot 
>>
>> Where exactly do you raw the line here?  Do we have to support RAID /
>> DM devices, too?  What about LVM?  If you look for "regular system
>> usage", using such technologies is more or less standard today.  Will
>> we need that?
>
> I think not supporting dm or lvm is fine. raid1 mdraid for /boot would
> be nice down the road. I say this from the view of an enterprise arm
> based server hardware with a pair of sas drives for the filesystem. I
> would think that the vendor that produces said hardware would be on the
> hook for writing the support. what we need to ensure is that the
> installer know what valid options it can support are. if we can't
> do /boot on raid we cant do it. 

Do we even know this on x86?

Perhaps so, since the distro installs grub, and knows which version of
grub is installed, and hence knows if it supports RAID-1?

Pluggable protocol modules a la UEFI would solve that;-)