On Wednesday 07 March 2007 04:00:24 MobileLinux wrote: > > > In an ideal world, yes. In practice the #1 problem in semi-embedded projects > > are BIOSes not booting from USB disks at all or unreliable. > > Lucky you if USB boot works for you that often :-) > > USB boot is not even in the top 100 problems, let alone the #1 problem, > in embedded system development. Most embedded devices boot from flash > storage. > > I venture to say, if you're developing an embedded system, you made a > design mistake trying to boot USB. There would have to be an extremely > good reason to want that on an embedded device.
Noone claimed they boot the system from USB. But eventually every know and then some service technican as to go to the devices in field and apply some feature/security/bugfix update. And since taking the device apart to access the internal storage USB-CD/stick booting the update media is the most comfortable and known way to install systems. Companies demanding this functionatliy will likely choose a device where USB support is functional in the system BIOS. And thats exactly the case where you have to go hunting 10 different boards of the same power/form-factor class in the hope one of them has a not-that-broken BIOS. > But maybe you're not really talking embedded. Whatever "semi-embedded" > means, PC/104 may qualify, since it's stock PC logic in a different > mechanical format. If you need maximum PC compatibility, you want > PC/104. It handles USB, VGA, Ethernet, all the normal stuff, like any > stock PC, often with very superior thermal/vibration/power-reg specs. Good that we have the choice with T2 to just-in-time build the sources for the CPU selected, and thus we supply mostly non-x86 systems due to their not so broken firmware implementations, such as ARM, MIPS, SuperH, and recently AVR32 and Blackfin. > If you found a couple bad embedded-USB vendors, stop using their > products, or stop using USB for embedded system boot. This thread was > about PC rescue. > > I don't understand this whole embedded systems tangent. Those almost > always require various levels of customized software labor/effort to > make work at all. "Bringing the board up" is famously known as the most > difficult step, if you want to talk about the #1 problem....and that's > without USB. Trying to generalize anything about desktop PCs - what > we're trying to rescue here, yes? - from embedded systems is really > backwards, especially since it's the other way around, in that the PC > world is invading the embedded world, as with PC/104. I think the thread drifted when some people just wanted to point out that for your mobile use-case scenario non HD-USB booting BIOS might be an issue. In any case it appears to work just fine for you so all's fine - yours, -- René Rebe - ExactCODE GmbH - Europe, Germany, Berlin http://exactcode.de | http://t2-project.org | http://rene.rebe.name +49 (0)30 / 255 897 45
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