[[RFC] 00/14] Bring in x86 support into 'barebox'

[Juergen Beisert]

On Donnerstag, 10. Dezember 2009, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 12:55, Alessandro Rubini wrote:
> > grub works but is braindead (I can't understand how could they make it
> > work, given the quality of code). While I use it for my diskless pc's, it
> > made me mad more than once.
>
> 200% on this from a distro (Gentoo) POV

I tried with grub2 prior adapting barebox to x86. Never seen such a bad code 
before. Nested C functions! Seems the developer likes his code, no one than 
himself can read.

> >> and the whole CoreBOOT project
> >> whose aim is to replace commercial BIOS products.
> >
> > it's still the bios. A crappy environment, and most people don't want
> > to risk bricking the pc just to get a bios instead of a bios.

ACK.

> this is the reason i havent flashed my mobo's with coreboot ... well,
> that and every time i look at the status page, there's a "Works *"
> next to my mobo and the "*" isnt something minor like "cannot change
> color of font".  by the time the "*" goes away, i've already upgraded
> :/.

Seems their progress is very slow. I tried to add some effort to coreboot-v3. 
But they didn't like my code cleanups. And now I read: "obsolete, 
unsupported, and experimental coreboot v3 tree". Ups?

> > While I would never have done that myself, and in general I agree with
> > you, if the internal design of barebox allows a bios-hosted
> > environment, such an effort is more than welcome, and I'm eager to
> > test it and say bye to grub as soon as possible.
>
> if barebox had the portability (one build image works on the majority
> of x86 desktops) and functionality of grub (mbr + 2nd stage in random
> fs), i'd switch to it on my desktop too

Currently we have no filesystem support (at least no for the majority of 
filesystems like ext2/3/4, reiserfs and so on). But it is no limitation of 
barebox, only someone must spent the time to port them. Currently my x86 port 
saves the environment settings into some fixed sectors on the disk. This is a 
workaround until we have real filesystem support with read *and* write 
capability.

jbe

-- 
Pengutronix e.K.                              | Juergen Beisert             |
Linux Solutions for Science and Industry      | Phone: +49-8766-939 228     |
Vertretung Sued/Muenchen, Germany             | Fax:   +49-5121-206917-5555 |
Amtsgericht Hildesheim, HRA 2686              | http://www.pengutronix.de/  |