On Fri, Oct 14, 2011 at 04:06:21PM -0400, Nicolas Pitre wrote:

Currently, U-Boot insists on having a uImage with a fixed absolute load 
address.  This is currently provided by the zreladdr value, whether or 
not AUTO_ZRELADDR is set.  I consider this as a persisting uImage 
limitation.

Either u-Boot gets fixed so it can work with plain zImage (and this 
certainly will happen once the pressure from people wanting a single 
kernel to work on targets with different load addresses increase.  
Tegra is one such example.

Or we create a u-Boot specific Kconfig menu for uImage options that 
would be common to all architectures and kick it out from the ARM 
specific makefile.  This is not solving the u-Boot limitation though.

In either cases this is a u-Boot problem that needs fixing on the u-Boot 
side in the end.

I don't think that's so with the various flavours of platform specific
uboot which float around.  For instance, on the OMAP4430 SDP, the
following commands were used as supplied to load a uImage off the SD
card into RAM at a different address to which it was built for, and
execute it at that address:

mmcinit 0
fatload mmc 0 0x80300000 uImage
bootm 80300000

Whether the 'bootm' command then copied the image and called it there,
or whether it executed it at 0x80300000 I've no idea - but why then
load the image at a different address in the first place?