Re: APEX and Debian
Don't get me wrong - I also think it's great to have an alternative to RedBoot as a first-stage bootloader, and will install APEX as a RedBoot replacement on one or more of my slugs as soon as it has network access.
But I will never recommend such a thing to the tens of thousands of users of nslu2-linux firmware, or the probably greater number of future Debian image users. Of course a lot of them will flash a new bootloader without the protection of JTAG access, but we (as a project) can't recommend that.
-- Rod
-----Original Message-----
From: "Marc Singer" <elf@carmine.cac.washington.edu>
Date: Thursday, Jul 20, 2006 9:48 am
Subject: Re: APEX and Debian
On Thu, Jul 20, 2006 at 01:26:23AM +0200, Martin Michlmayr wrote:
* Marc Singer <elf@carmine.cac.washington.edu> [2006-07-19 14:30]:
> My goal is to make APEX a reasonable replacement for Redboot. Once
> we have an ethernet driver, we can work out the upgrade details such
> that there is nothing that Redboot does that APEX cannot do as well
> or do better.
For the record, we'll probably never *replace* RedBoot because
flashing something over RedBoot has the potential to brick your
machine. However, it's certainly a great goal to have networking and
other features in APEX so we can simply use RedBoot to load APEX and
then use the latter to do the real work.
..whoever 'we' is...
:-)
I'm aware that there will probably never be a Debian policy of
replacing Redboot. At this point, there isn't an alternative with
equivalent features, so discussions of replacing Redboot have been
moot. But there is a need since there are some projects that replace the manufacturer's boot loader due to exigencies of the platform.
There is a lot of room for improvement on Redboot and having a good alternative may encourage some people who wish they had something
better to replace it. I use APEX on my Slugs because of the long
boot-time. APEX brings the system up in about 10 seconds. Redboot
takes almost a minute, IIRC.
> --
Martin Michlmayr
http://www.cyrius.com/
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