Subject: Re: [bug#35217] gnu: u-boot: Update to 2019.04.

From: Danny Milosavljevic <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2019 23:02:14 +0200

Hi Vagrant,

On Wed, 10 Apr 2019 15:22:18 -0700
Vagrant Cascadian <[email-masked]> wrote:

> > On 2019-04-10, Vagrant Cascadian wrote:
> > * gnu/packages/bootloaders (u-boot): Update to 2019.04.  
> ...
> >   (u-boot-am335x-evm): New variable.
> >   (u-boot-am335x-boneblack): Deprecate variable.  
> 
> The am335x-boneblack configuration was dropped from upstream.
> 
> The am335x-evm image is considerably larger than the am335x-boneblack
> images, which leads to issues when installing at a device offset, as it
> will overwrite the first partition unless the first partition starts
> significantly later than most tools (parted, cfdisk) default of sector
> 2048 (beagleboard.org images start the first partition at sector 8192).
> 
> The embedded-os-installation code should probably check to make sure
> they aren't trampling the first partition if installing to the raw
> device offset.

That would make the parted bindings a hard dependency, probably even
build-side.  But I think that would still be better than the alternative:
destroying user filesystems.

> Alternately, it's possible to copy the u-boot.img onto the first FAT
> partition of the microSD/eMMC, which will be loaded instead of the
> offset. But that takes some rethinking of how to install the bootloader
> (which would be good to not diverge from upstream for other platforms,
> such as u-boot-novena).

Yeah, I think sooner or later it's going to come to this.  Might as well
bite the bullet now.

> In light of all that, I'm not sure what a proper way forward is...

Yeah, sounds like a bad situation with no nice solution that allows
updating of existing installations.  In that case, keeping existing
installations on the old version would be preferrable to breaking
them.