On Monday 06 April 2009 15:49:43 Wolfgang Denk wrote: > In message Scott Wood wrote: > > > There are tons of standards for image formats, and even more commonly > > > used formats I would not dare to call standard; but this processor > > > has to invent yet another one? > > > > The same could be said about u-boot requiring its own image format (ELF > > and raw binary images can't be passed a device tree or bd_t, AFAICT). > > When the U-Boot (or rather PPCBoot at that time) development was > starte, there was a very important reason for not using ELF: wasting > a full 64 kB for the standard ELF file header was unthinkable on most > embedded devices of that time. > > Now, on fat systems with ample resource on one side, and on the other > side with the infrastructure more or less in place to compose a bootm > command from small, separate building blocks, it should be not > difficult to add such a feature, too. > > On the other hand, ELF images are missing a few key points available > in U-Boot images so I would not recommend using plain ELF for any > system where reliability or just ease of use are important (which was > the other part of the rationale that led to that format).
which are the same reasons processors do not implement support for ELF as a booting source ... lets say i was to design a brand new part today with an on-chip rom that supports booting from a variety of sources (UART, SPI/I2C/NAND flashes, directly addressable NOR flashes, as a slave device to SPI/I2C, etc...), what format would you recommend that could satisfy all of these requirements ? i'm not aware of any which is why the Blackfin processor has its own stripped down LDR format. -mike _______________________________________________ U-Boot mailing list U-Boot@lists.denx.de http://lists.denx.de/mailman/listinfo/u-boot