need to support distro boot config

[ausil]

u-boot upstream has support for using a standardised distro mechanism using extlinux.conf files. it needs to be supported

[qolii]

Please do this! This is huge.

[jan-kiszka]

There are some bits in u-boot-2017.03-armada-18.06 now, but they are incomplete, at least fdtfile is missing. Moreover, it's still based on that old 2017.03 u-boot.

The only reasonable way forward is pushing the remaining bits into upstream (seems like there are problems with RAM size detection and MMC, plus a fatal regression since 2018.07) and finally retiring this fork. That would greatly improve the user experience.

[kostapr]

The new Marvell 18.09 release is based on u-boot-2018.03. This code should be available at early September.

[jan-kiszka]

Please move to upstream instead. Just started that discussion on the u-boot list. Forks don't work in practice, and that's not only my personal opinion, we face such issues at work all time with vendor trees. I'm happy to explain your management if they think otherwise ;-).

[kostapr]

Yes, I understand you, but we have to use some baseline for our QA and for customers that are going to production. What we have to do is to invest some time in pushing our patches to the mainline tree. This is the step our management gets involved :-)

[jan-kiszka]

Eventually, it's just a matter of routing your QA efforts to the right tree (AKA upstream). I know that this may take some time to achieve if your backlog (patch queue) is still too long, but maintaining forks is not the solution. It's only distracting valuable resources.

[qolii]

I am super excited for this.

[kostapr]

The release 18.09 is out

[jan-kiszka]

When will the download page be updated? When do you plan to set fdtfile properly? And when do you have time to follow up on the upstream discussion (https://lists.denx.de/pipermail/u-boot/2018-August/339362.html)?

BTW, see siemens/jailhouse-images@973599e for the user story when building an image with a real distro for that board. I will redirect our users to the new vendor u-boot once it's available as binary.