U-Boot customization: Using mainline or follow eewiki.net and apply patches ? Differences ?

[slamontagne]

Hi,

We use the BeagleBone Green and I need to make some customization to U-Boot to make sure phantom characters would not stop the BeagleBone from booting.

I have experience in creating custom boards in U-Boot and generally I could have fix this simple phantom character problem by simply saving the proper bootdelay environment variables in U-Boot during the manufacturing process. But, the BeagleBone Black/Green use a uEnv.txt file for the environment variables and it cannot be used for bootdelay. So, I need to customize the default environments.

I know how to do all that, my question is: Should I use U-Boot mainline (https://github.com/u-boot/u-boot/tree/v2017.01) or do I absolutely need to follow eewiki.net (https://eewiki.net/display/linuxonarm/BeagleBone+Black#BeagleBoneBlack-Bootloader:U-Boot) and apply the patches listed there before starting the customization ?

What are the differences between mainline and eewiki's patched version ?

Thank you

Sylvain Lamontagne

[Robert Nelson]

On Mon, Jan 16, 2017 at 6:03 PM, slamontagne
<sylvain.l...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> We use the BeagleBone Green and I need to make some customization to U-Boot
> to make sure phantom characters would not stop the BeagleBone from booting.

That's this 4 line change.. ;)

https://github.com/RobertCNelson/Bootloader-Builder/blob/master/patches/v2017.01/0001-am335x_evm-uEnv.txt-bootz-n-fixes.patch#L821-L824

We pushed it mainline, lasted about two releases before a later change
disabled it.

> I have experience in creating custom boards in U-Boot and generally I could
> have fix this simple phantom character problem by simply saving the proper
> bootdelay environment variables in U-Boot during the manufacturing process.
> But, the BeagleBone Black/Green use a uEnv.txt file for the environment
> variables and it cannot be used for bootdelay. So, I need to customize the
> default environments.
>
> I know how to do all that, my question is: Should I use U-Boot mainline
> (https://github.com/u-boot/u-boot/tree/v2017.01) or do I absolutely need to
> follow eewiki.net
> (https://eewiki.net/display/linuxonarm/BeagleBone+Black#BeagleBoneBlack-Bootloader:U-Boot)
> and apply the patches listed there before starting the customization ?
>
> What are the differences between mainline and eewiki's patched version ?

Most of our patchset is to support 'stuff' we came up with before
extlinux/distro_defaults went into u-boot mainline.

Then we have support for board's in flight.. BeagleBone Green
Wireless/BeagleBone Black Wireless, when those dts files get merged
into linus' master tree for v4.11.0-rc1 i'll push them to u-boot
master.. (they are staged in linux-omap right now)

Then lots of "debug" enablement, from when we chased fun bugs..

Regards,

--
Robert Nelson
https://rcn-ee.com/