Gentle persons: Don't know why I missed it before, but I just stumbled across the barebox project (www.barebox.org). It claims to combine the best of U-Boot with the Tao of Linux.
"barebox is a bootloader that initializes hardware and boots Linux and perhaps other operating systems or bare metal code on a variety of processors. It was initially derived from U-Boot and preserves many of its features, so users familiar with U-Boot should become productive with barebox relatively quickly. However, as the barebox developers are highly addicted to the Linux kernel, its coding style and code quality, we try to stick as closely as possible to the methodologies and techniques developed in Linux. In addition, we have a strong background in POSIX, so you'll find several good old Unix traditions implemented in barebox as well." Of special interest to me is the statement "[I]n contrast to U-Boot, barebox doesn't misuse the environment for scripting. If you start the bootloader, it gives you a shell and something that looks like a filesystem." It's exactly that "misuse" of the environment that makes U-Boot tricky to use. I hope to steal some minutes today to test whether the most recent release supports the BBW and BBB properly. If it works, it will give us a natural environment for constructing boot menus and who knows what else. In practice, powering up a BBW/BBB would proceed from the first-stage ROM code to second- and third-stage boot code contained in whatever barebox uses in place of the U-Boot MLO/u-boot.img and then to the barebox shell. Looking at their download directory, the barebox (always in lowercase) project has been pushing out releases pretty regularly since Christmas 2009 so there's some reason to be optimistic it will continue. Regards, Kent ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Learn Graph Databases - Download FREE O'Reilly Book "Graph Databases" is the definitive new guide to graph databases and their applications. This 200-page book is written by three acclaimed leaders in the field. The early access version is available now. Download your free book today! http://p.sf.net/sfu/neotech_d2d_may _______________________________________________ Emc-developers mailing list Emc-developers@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-developers
