"Beyond Buildworld" (was Re: RFC: "Crochet" build tool)

[Warner Losh]

On Apr 6, 2013, at 7:10 PM, Tim Kientzle wrote:

> On Apr 6, 2013, at 2:03 PM, Warner Losh wrote:
> 
>> Most boards have a perfectly good boot loader already, but
>> some like the popular RPi don't.
> 
> Neither does the BeagleBone, Pandaboard, nor I suspect
> many of the other "hobbyist" boards that people would really want
> pre-built images for.

I don't believe this is the case for most uboot-based boards.... It sure looks like the mars board I just got has a boot loader, I think uboot, but I need to finish some soldering to confirm.

>> Thankfully, the images for the boot loaders tend to be separable
>> from the main image that people load on them and run/boot.
> 
> All of the boards mentioned above require a boot partition
> and boot loader chain as part of the main image.

Require, or that's one of many ways to update them? The usual way in all the boards I've dealt with is that one generally doesn't update the boot partition, but you do update the kernel and root partitions (possibly with repartitioning). Are you sure that you are required to include the primary boot loader when updating?

> I believe this is common to most of the new hobbyist
> boards.

That's definitely different than all the other ARM boards I've dealt with....

Warner