U-boot support for ext4 boot

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by xkxx, Nov 1, 2013.

  1. xkxx

    xkxx New Member

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    Is it possible to release a more recent u-boot version that supports ext4 boot? It appears that the u-boot that udoo uses is from 2009 which only has ext2/3 and fat support. Ext4 without journaling should perform much, much faster than any of these file systems, and performance is especially important for people who will be using udoo as a microserver like i do.

    Of course releasing the source code would be awesome, but for the moment I'll be content with closed u-boot with ext4 support.
     
  2. andcmp

    andcmp New Member

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    The UDOO team is already working on the uboot 2013, we are about to validate it. When ready we will release binaries and sources too!
     
  3. xkxx

    xkxx New Member

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    That's incredible news! Looking forward to fiddling with the quad core cpu once I get my ext4 root boot up!
     
  4. bilsch

    bilsch New Member

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    Any chance of supporting a boot from f2fs? Given the sd card, this may be helpful
     
  5. miousername

    miousername New Member

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    Hi,

    You can build an Sd card with 2 partitions!

    Kernel in first partition. Ext3

    Filesystem in the second partition ext4

    In this way you don't need an uboot supporting ext4 for kernel loading
     
  6. xkxx

    xkxx New Member

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    Hello miousername,

    That's technically true, but hard to do right in reality. Let me explain:

    The reason to use ext4 over ext2/3 is performance. The performance of a SD card depends on a bunch of things, but one of the most important one is block alignment.
    Now we don't know about the page size/erase size of most SD cards, so we have to fiddle around and guess, and a lot of times we will get it wrong. Then with that knowledge you have to format the card with the correct parameters, which again is easy to mess up. The more partitions you have, the more probable you will mess it up.

    That's the reason I'd rather have one ext4 partition than a ext2 and a ext4 partition. Ain't gonna bother with multiple partitions again.

    And btw: how's the new u-boot going? I would also like to see f2fs support, so I can compare the performance between that and ext4. Looking forward to the new release:)
     
  7. xkxx

    xkxx New Member

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    Is there any update on this? Got an ETA I can look forward to?
     
  8. jerrino77

    jerrino77 UDOOer

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    You can download U-boot from ArchLinux, it already have ext4 support and works great.

    or
     

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