Guys: On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 11:48 AM, Lennart Sorensen <lsore...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote: > In terms of being unbrickable, I am very impressed by my i.MX53 quick > start board. The bootloader is on microSD. Any actual board designed > with it could have the boot loader on a SATA disk if desired. There is > no boot rom at all in the design as far as I can tell.
I really, really hate this idea. :) I much prefer having a bootloader in NAND, so that I'm not beholden to all the i/o necessary to read it from somewhere more complicated and less controllable. In addition, I really, really hate the quality levels I am seeing with uSD/eMMC devices right now. I know they are all internally based on NAND, why not ditch the little microcontroller they must also include and talk to a NAND directly? One less part to break, and one less thing to question the sanity of when you switch that device from FAT (which it is almost certainly optimized for) and extN or equivalent. (OT, but I wonder if the hangs and hiccups I see often enough to worry about aren't in some way due to the microcontroller's assumptions about the filesystem in use). Finally, obviously what you are calling the "bootloader" in your board is merely a second-stage one, as the CPU almost certainly does not natively know how to read from uSD. A first-stage bootloader must exist somewhere in the SoC itself. That doesn't really matter if you are happy always reading from a presumed-functional uSD, but as a platform integrator I would want to research what other options it makes available--- especially ones that would allow me to have a "factory reset button" on the unit that truly wipes the uSD and initiates a fresh download of a kernel and rootfs over https from somewhere. Don't get me wrong, I like the Quick Start board too (I think I have one on my desk somewhere, actually). But I don't like the temptation to turn something like that into a product without a lot of additional thought. I'm looking at you too, Beagleboard. :) b.g. -- Bill Gatliff b...@billgatliff.com -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-arm-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/CADkCAut3=m86n00y6pdengu86oceyfttmb8fbjnc-zv+08u...@mail.gmail.com
