[PATCH 13/17] defaultenv: handle disk partitions

Jean-Christophe PLAGNIOL-VILLARD plagnioj at jcrosoft.com
Tue Oct 12 02:51:50 EDT 2010


> > > > >
> > > > > Are you sure you want/need additional partitions on a disk without a
> > > > > persistant partition table?
> > > >
> > > > No ;)
> > > >
> > > > It is not completely clear to me how we handle this best. On i.MX51 I
> > > > have some problems with the partition table. When booting from SD card
> > > > we just dump barebox.bin to the raw card. The partition table is then
> > > > part of barebox.bin. Unfortunately we do not know (or at least we don't
> > > > want to specifiy) the size of the card during compile time.
> > > >
> > > > How should a bootable SD card should be partitioned anyway? We could
> > > > add partitions for barebox/env/kernel/root like usual, but this does
> > > > not look very standard for SD cards (and we even need extended
> > > > partitions if we want to add a data partition). We could also add just
> > > > a single partition for root and maintain the rest outside of any
> > > > partition.
> > >
> > > If you want your kernel to work with this card you will need a partition
> > > table. Its more like a hard disk, not like a flash memory of NAND or NOR
> > > type. So, IMHO you will need a full blown partition table when you want
> > > use the SD card outside barebox.
> >
> > Yes I know. Do we need a fdisk command for barebox?
> 
> IMHO not for barebox. Because to setup a full system on an SD card you would 
> also need tools to create a filesystem on these partitions. That's not the 
> job of a bootloader. We just have to handle partition tables in a correct 
> manner.
I think we can support fdisk but we do not need to create fs we can just dump
it from tftp & co

and the env can be see as a fs

Best Regards,
J.



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