I've been meaning to work on further integrating u-boot support into debian-installer, and I see a few different routes forward...
Currently, the thre are installer images available for boot media on several media, but nothing handles upgrading u-boot after the initial installation. Also, using debian-installer on armhf boards frequently get the "continue without bootloader" prompt, which I think it would be ideal to avoid, and certainly unecessary on some boards. I think it would be fairly safe for specific boards to automatically install and upgrade u-boot on the media(perhaps opt-in with debconf questions), at least for the armhf boards for which debian-installer currently generates images, and similar boards. I wouldn't propose this for boards which write to flash or other media where it's much easier to brick the machine, I only suggest to do this for boards where it is fairly safe to do. I'd like to move the gen-hd-image code which is used in debian-installer to generate boot images into the u-boot-tools package, and refactor it to allow installing directly to SD cards (without repartitioning). Then, if the offsets needed to write to media change in u-boot, it can be updated in the u-boot source package rather than requiring additional changes to debian-installer and/or flash-kernel. On the other hand, flash-kernel contains a database of boards and various configuration options, boot scripts, etc. and I'm not sure how to avoid duplication of information. Would it make more sense to keep extending flash-kernel for additional features (such as installing u-boot and supporting extlinux.conf), or would it make sense to replace some or all of the functionality of flash-kernel (at least for newer boards)? I'm happy to put some time into this, but would like to discuss these ideas with folks to avoid duplication of effort, stepping on toes, needlessly rewriting code, etc. live well, vagrant
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