[U-Boot] Installing u-boot for x86 (non EFI) on a disk

[Bin Meng]

Hi Igor,

On Tue, Aug 11, 2015 at 9:18 PM, Stoppa, Igor <igor.stoppa at intel.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have read the documentation coming with u-boot and several other
> links that I got from Google, but I am still confused on certain
> items.
>
> I'll gladly provide patches for enhancing the documentation, if anyone
> can help me
> to understand better.
>
> My impression is that the typical way of running u-boot in non-EFI
> mode is to create its raw version. Because the alternative is to build
> u-boot as coreboot payload, but not many target HW use coreboot.  Is
> this correct?
>

U-Boot supports running bare-metal as well as being loaded as a
coreboot payload. For the base-metal case, U-Boot is the actual BIOS
which boots from the x86 reset vector.

> Googling, I found this link [1] from the qemu ml archives, which shows
> how to build and start a u-boot rom file in qemu. Which works also for
> me.
>

This is documented in README.x86 @
http://git.denx.de/?p=u-boot.git;a=blob;f=doc/README.x86;h=af2459c7ed6af55d989f2902bbf8ec4646975aaa;hb=HEAD#l255

> However I would like to create a loop file, install u-boot in it and
> pass that file to qemu as hda, rather than using the rom file.
>

Why do you want to do this way? U-Boot does not support this use case so far.

> How do I install u-boot? From what I understood I should put something
> in the (disk? / partition?) MBR and copy something else elsewhere.
>
> But I could not figure out what goes where, exactly. Could anybody
> please enlighten me?
>

As mentioned above, this is not supported. But if you can figure it
out, patches are welcome :-)

>
> [1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2015-05/msg04835.html
> --


Regards,
Bin