On 02/27/2013 03:03 AM, Marc Dietrich wrote:

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

quoted

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.

There is a package of u-boot bootloaders, but they are not installed by
the OS. On ubuntu, installing a kernel only writes the boot.scr script.
There is an assumption that u-boot will go and read this. So we already
have some requirements on u-boot which would require at least a u-boot
environment update. I guess updating the environment is easier than
u-boot itself, but that probably depends on the platform.

Rob