Harald Welte wrote: > Do you realize that you are just scrapping the ability to > boot any different OS on the device?
I wonder how you jump to this conclusion. It's not as if there'd be some "secret trusted BIOS" that enforces signed binaries or such. > By switching to kexec, you virtually remove that ability. Yes, people > can still replace the linux kernel with a bootloader, but it is _MUCH_ > harder since you have to do all the low-leve setup such as GPIO > configuration, etc. again. A common bootloader for PLL/GPIO init helps > a lot in that regard. They'll have to port tons of drivers anyway. I doubt a few GPIOs, would break their back :-) If they're really having too hard a time to bring up their kernel, they could even take the old u-boot code and run that first. Or just bring up Linux and dump the registers they're interested in. Yes, I can see how it might (*) make the effort of porting a non-Linux system marginally easier. However, I don't see any sensible relation between this and the drain of resources keeping u-boot around means to us. (*) Actually, if I had to start from scratch, I'd probably just do all the initialization myself anyway, so that it's done by code I fully control. I can understand your decision for choosing u-boot when there was no code at all that ran on our platform. But now we're in a much better situation, and we can move on and use tools that fit our needs better. > Also, dual-booting different OS's is no longer possible. We obviously want to be able to choose kernels. So any other OS would just be another binary that you load and jump to. No discrimination there. (BTW, you're already talking about the next step, which would be NAND booting. For now, we're just thinking about NOR.) - Werner