U-Boot-Linaro future planning

[rsalveti, Jan 2, 2012] Just adding the notes from the session.

U-Boot-Linaro:
* Features currently maintained off the tree
* New feature development
* Board support

Current U-Boot-Linaro:
 * Based on 2011.09 release
 * PXE support from calxeda
   - Support at Panda, Beagle, Igepv2
 * OMAP 4 EHCI support
 * Disabled cache for omap (3 and 4)
 * Freescale LT patches for iMX53
 * ARM Vexpress A5 and A9 support

Current issues:
 * Cache with omap 3 and 4
 * Efika mx support (not yet tested)
 * Snowball not yet mainline
   - On top of 2010.09
   - 2 mmc/sd controllers (needs to be refactored)
   - some support for the href 8500
 * Origen is using their own u-boot based on u-boot-linaro, need to work to get the patches applied
 * Freescale
   - Always save environment to microSD when configured to boot with SD card.
   - New PMIC (Ripley) doesn't support yet.
* VExpress
   - Can't boot by running boot.scr

SPL USB support:
 * current in development for OMAP 4 (musb)
 * looking forward to support MX5

Device tree support at U-Boot:
 - Just went upstream
 - Google wants same u-boot for different tegra 2 boards
 - Future work could include support for linaro targets

Efika:
 - USB support on going
 - Basic support is supposed to be merged already
 - Building package for efikamx only
 - Would need support from the community

Future development:
 - Improve boot support with external disk
 - Emulate grub support of a menu/config (or implementing grub using u-boot's api, need to check how hard it would be to implement)
 - vmlinuz support
 - linaro octo is requiring this support
 - splash screen support:
   - issues when initializing the screen and then booting the kernel
   - how to tell the kernel which hardware was already initialized by the boot loader
   - idea is to avoid a specific combination of kernel/bootloader