On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 2:37 PM, Andy Green andy@openmoko.com wrote:
The philosophy I plan to follow is the OS is the only payload we are interested in. Any applications would then be normal Linux apps in a normal Linux rootfs. We saw plenty of U-Boot specific code rot whereas there are nice living libs for UI or applications in Linux, many users can imagine to contribute normal Python apps, etc.
yep, that is pretty much what the original plan with linuxbios was in 1999, so I love the plan :-)
It makes sense to do this as opposed to make the boot loader complicated. Every boot loader that tries anything fancy inevitably turns into its own little OS, as witness OFW, U-boot, EFI, Alpha boot loader, and so on.
I have to get an open moko now!
s3c processors from Samsung have a piece of magic SRAM, either 4K or 8K bytes which gets filled from NAND or SD Card by magic at reset, then jumped into. This chunk of SRAM is called "steppingstone" by Samsung. The task of the code in there is to init the SDRAM and pull the rest of the bootloader (Qi binary is around 24KBytes currently), then jump into that. imx31 from Freescale is also using a similar scheme.
neat.
If you want to extend coreboot to work with ARM go for it by all means... Qi code is all GPL'd and in git
http://git.openmoko.org/?p=qi.git;a=summary
Take a look at src/phase2.c to see the flow into Linux. I think you'll find it's not only lean in the sources but quite tight as a binary.
we'll see if anyone jumps on this. Thanks for the link troy.
Somehow this thread has gotten dropped across two lists, so we should probably close it down before people not on each list get annoyed.
Thanks again
ron