[U-Boot] U-Boot Graphics Library?

[Stefano Babic]

On 16/01/2013 22:46, Simon Glass wrote:
> Hi Wolfgang,
> 

Hi Simon,

>>
>> This sounds like a nice feature.  Initially.  Then I start wondering
>> if this really belongs into a boot loader.  Instead of doing fancy
>> graphics stuff, we should IMO rather focus on booting the OS of your
>> choice really fast, and let this do the fancy GUIs.  Or?
>>
> 
> The problem is that a major purpose of the GUIs is to allow installing
> an OS from a USB stick/SD card, since the OS may have become corrupted
> and unbootable. We have looked at keeping around a separate OS image
> for this (e.g. in an available disk partition), but so far that hasn't
> proved practical since that itself can be fairly easily overwritten
> and we then have a doorstop.
> 

Well, if a separate OS image can be overwritten, U-Boot image can be
overwritten too, and then the board does not boot at all.

I provided for a customer a solution with a separate OS and a small
rootfs as initramfs, and even if it is theoretically possible to destroy
this image, it has the same probability that U-Boot has to disappear. It
still seems to me a good solution, with the drawback to use much more
resorces (Flash) that a U-Boot solution can use. Anyway, with the
current size of NAND flash, even this drawback is not very important in
many projects.

Maybe more as a GUI-guided recovery, the customer needs a way to rescue
the system when everything goes wrong. Providing a booting SD or USB
card, that can complete restore the system, seems to be a good way, or
at least it was in my case.

Implementing it in U-Boot seems to me overkilling, but is only my 2
cents ;-).

Best regards,
Stefano


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