Consumer productions are better off with fixed NAND and one slot.
That's because consumers don't change their OS all of the time. Plus
they don't know how to get an OS loaded onto an SD Card. Fixed NAND
makes it harder for the consumer to mess up the OS.
Developer products benefit from two slots. You can remove the OS SD
Card and stick it into the host which is the fastest way to write it.
Want to switch between Android and Ubuntu? swap cards. Have another
card for a dedicated XBMC setup.
I haven't played with low level boot on the A10, but I work on a
similar CPU. Two slots is great for working on uboot. Now you don't
need a JTAG to keep loading uboot while you work on it. Pull the card
and write a new uboot to it when it hangs. Debug it with printf.
I can't see any real downside to two SD Card slots on a developer
oriented board. I actually prefer the OS slot to be a full sided SD
Card. The micro cards are so small they are hard to handle when your
are moving them back and forth between systems twenty times a day.
An even better setup is to make an OS SD card that only contains
uboot. That uboot is set to load the kernel using tftp. The kernel is
then set to nfs boot from the host. Of course that means we need
uboot working on the A10. Stick this card into the board and now you
don't have to flash anything on each dev cycle.
Of course you can do all of this with the fixed NAND too.
>
> --
> Emilio
>
--
Jon Smirl
jons...@gmail.com