Am Dienstag, 26. Februar 2013, 09:39:15 schrieb Stephen Warren:

On 02/26/2013 02:36 AM, Marc Dietrich wrote:

quoted

Am Montag, 25. Februar 2013, 16:47:38 schrieb Stephen Warren:

quoted

...
Now, I can easily add those 3 errata workarounds to U-Boot, but that
will require people to reflash their bootloader. This is probably
acceptable for development/reference boards (although I'm sure people
will find it annoying) but for re-purposed production boards (such as
the Toshiba AC100 or various tablets) it will be impossible to update
the factory bootloader. Switching to upstream U-Boot would currently
lose some functionality, and significantly affect people's boot flow, so
is likely unacceptable.

personally, I have no problem to require a certain u-boot version for a
given kernel. From a distro point of view, you will likely update the
bootloader/kernel on a distro update anyway.

So a distro will certainly update the kernel.

But updating a bootloader would be very unusual, I believe.

mmh? Every time I update to a new distro release, the bootloader gets also 
updated - even on arm, e.g. ftp://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/pool/main/u/u-boot-linaro lists four version of uboot - one for each supported distro 
release. I know for closed embedded device this is different, but that's not 
our target.

Also, I hope that upstream U-Boot is never going to support the bizarre
"Tegra partition table" cruft that our "fastboot" bootloader supports,
so you'll end up completely re-programming the flash (BCT, bootloader,
partition table, all filesystems) if you want to switch to U-Boot. That
seems like a fair chunk for the installer to own, but I guess if you're
comfortable with doing that, I won't complain.

Yes, that a huge pile of work and people are working on this already. One the 
other hand, why (if not for upgrade use) do we have u-boot support for all 
these legacy boards?

Marc