>>So for booting a vm we don't actually need a boot loader, since it passes the >>kernel image through the -kernel flag. > > Huh, that appears to be the case. Back when I used VMs the first time they > simulated the entire PC, BIOS and all and there you would need the partition > table, bootloader etc just as you would on a real PC. But it seems to have > changed now...
Does the u-boot bootloader routine have to do anything other than generating the extlinux.conf file? That would be enough so that there is an alternative to grub-install for the qemu use case and for actual boards, isn't uboot usually written to flash instead of to a MBR? > Yes, I wrote it. It makes sure it's safe to write to an unclaimed > fixed-position section of a drive and then writes to it. > > Essentially it does > > $ dd if=u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin of=/dev/sdX bs=1024 seek=8 > ^^^ ^^^ > depends on board depends on board > > but only after making sure that this doesn't clobber anything (payload data > on parititons, the partition table etcetc). > > It's supposed to be analogous to grub-install, just for u-boot. Nice!
