On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 03:57:34PM -1000, Simon Glass wrote: > Hi Tom, > > On 21 May 2014 10:46, Tom Rini <tr...@ti.com> wrote: > > On Wed, May 21, 2014 at 10:10:50PM +0200, Wolfgang Denk wrote: > >> Dear Tom Rini, > >> > >> In message <20140521195824.GE1752@bill-the-cat> you wrote: > >> > > >> > Something that Rob mentioned to me at ELC, and others have mentioned > >> > before is that it would be nice if 'bootm' (which says "boot application > >> > image stored in memory" in the help, even) would just work with zImage > >> > or Image or whatever is spit directly out of the kernel. > >> > >> I don;t think this is a good idea. "application image" is supposed to > >> mean "one of the U-Boot image formats", which means the old legacy > >> image format (with the 64 byte header), or FIT images. To boot a > >> zImage file, we have the "bootz" command. > > > > Yes, it's historically meant something with an essentially (technically > > no, practically, yes) U-Boot centric header on it. But that's not what > > the help text says. And yes we have bootz for zImages and I added booti > > for Image images. That resulted in "You mean I have to type different > > things for arm and arm64? *sigh*" when explaining this in person. > > > >> I also think such a patch is pushing into the wrong direction. We > >> should rather try and improve the kernel support for FIT images. > > > > That's neither here nor there. You can create and boot FIT images > > today, anywhere it's enabled (including arm64). You can do the same > > with legacy images (which also resulted in sighs when I mentioned this). > > The kernel doesn't want any of this in the kernel tree. Developers want > > to have as few steps between "build my kernel" and "now I'm testing my > > kernel". Adding in "create / grab stub FIT file, run mkimage" results > > in more unhappy developers. > > Unless I'm imagining it, some years ago I could type 'make fit_image' > or similar for the kernel and get an image ready to boot. Did someone > remove that feature from Linux and expect the number of steps needed > to build a kernel to stay the same?
It wasn't in mainline, I'm fairly certain. Or maybe it was an arch/ppc thing that got dropped along the way. > It surprises me the lengths to which people are going to try to > shoehorn .dtbs, compression, multiple dtbs, multi-arch etc. into the > kenel zImage format. The decompression header is ugly, plus it is > slower than doing these things in U-Boot. Well, with arm64 the kernel is just getting out of the business, hence booti (or however we add Image support) and not do the zImage dance. -- Tom
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