FreeBSD and U-Boot -- was: Ramdisk support

[Rafal Jaworowski]

Gary Jennejohn wrote:
> 
> u-boot is unfortuately extremely Linux-centric. I work closely with the
> person who "invented" u-boot, Wolfgang Denk, and know that he'd just love
> to see the *BSD support improved.
> 
> Unfortunately, u-boot makes heavy use of Linux' support for rootdev, etc.,
> which AFAIK is missing in FreeBSD. It heavily depends on passing lots of
> necessary information in the Linux command line to influence the boot
> process.
> 

Hi Gary,
we have working patches for U-Boot that extend 'bootm' to recognize and 
handle parsing FreeBSD/powerpc ELF image and passing control to it; 
among others these compose FreeBSD-style metadata, the goal is aldo to 
convert some U-Boot env vars to FreeBSD kenv equivalents etc. but it's 
not fully supported yet.

On a related note - we are having a discussion on freebsd-ppc list 
towards setting the common convention for registers' usage etc. so we 
can handle booting PowerPC kernel from different bootloaders (it's 
strictly OF/Mac oriented now).

Once this is agreed and prototyped/tested the changes will by 
contributed to U-Boot (I'm sure, too, Wolfgang will be glad to see those;)

kind regards,
Rafal