Dear Peter,

In message [ref] you wrote:

quoted

Why chose a different name at all? We could still call it "uImage",
meaning "U-Boot image" - U-Boot is clever enought o detect
automatically if we pass it an old style or a fit image.

I agree with your point to an extent, but having 2 types of uImages is
somewhat confusing to a user, even if U-Boot can differentiate between
them.  And if the legacy image and FIT image had the same Make target,
how does a user specify which type they want to build?  The fact that
both "legacy" and FIT images would reside at arch/powerpc/boot/uImage
doesn't make things any less confusing to Joe User.

Agreed.

Currently U-Boot supports booting:
1 "legacy" uImages
2 "new" Flattened Image Tree (FIT) uImages

The "legacy" uImage format has a number of restrictions not unsimilar
to the restrictions we had in the bootloader / kernel interface when
using the old binary bd_info data structur. For the kernel interface
this has been replaced by using the device tree, and I would like to
see the same happen in U-Boot.

The "new" FIT image type should become the default, and old "legacy"
images should only be generated upon special request (i. e. if some-
one needs these for compatibility with an old, not yet FIT-aware
version of the boot loader).

What do you think about changing the U-Boot documentation to rename
those 2 image types to:
1 uImages
2 FIT Images

Let's make this "uImage.old" (or "uImage.legacy" similar) and
"uImage", then.

The FIT image is a relatively generic image type - its just a blob that
dtc created from a device tree and some input binaries.  In my mind its
not intimately tied to U-Boot, at least not conceptually.  The "legacy"

Correct. The intention was to provide an open and somewhat
"standardized" format that can be easily extended for new
requirements, whatever these may be.

uImages have to agree with U-Boot's header format defined in the U-Boot
source code, so the uImage name does make sense with respect to the
"legacy" uImages.

Well, you can read "uImage" as "universal Image", which kind of fits
the FIT approach :-)

My vote would be to make the Linux FIT target rule "fitImage" and then
update the U-Boot documentation to make obvious the differences between
uImages and FIT images.

I think we should not try to support both legacy and FIT images on the
same level - the idea is clearly that legacy images is the old, to be
replaced format, while FIT images is the new, to be used as standard
format. In this sense I vote for using plain and simple "uImage" for
the (new) standard format, and marking the old format by some ".old"
or ".legacy" suffix.

BTW: note that (IIRC) we don't even have a formal definition of the
"FIT" abbreviation yet ;-)

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

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