Barebox bootloader for Canon cameras announcement

[frantony]

Subject: barebox bootloader for Canon cameras announcement

Barebox (formerly known as U-Boot v2) is a awesome
bootloader for the ARM-based boards (see http://www.barebox.org).

There is a very initial support for Canon cameras in barebox.

Supported cameras:

* Canon PowerShot A1100;
* Canon EOS 600D;
* Canon EOS Magic Lantern qemu-based emulator.

Just now barebox for Canon cameras is a demo
but after some improvements it can become very
handy tool for CHDK and Magic Lantern development.

Announcement and instructions in the Barebox maillist:
    http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/barebox/2013-August/015820.html

Barebox with Canon DIGIC support sources:
    http://github.com/frantony/barebox/tree/next.digic

Your comments and questions are welcome!

[nanomad]

Nice job.   
Please correct me if I'm wrong, is it for using the ARM as a "bare metal" platform?

[g3gg0]

wow, very cool.
i am not sure how we would merge this into Magic Lantern, but i like the idea a lot.

the only VERY practical thing i can think about is building an abstraction level to select the ML version to boot.
depending on the camera model and firmware version it loads the specific ML version.

[jplxpto]

Great news. I've used a few times the U-Boot. Every day we have Linux running on our camera hihihihiih

[frantony]

Nice job.   
Please correct me if I'm wrong, is it for using the ARM as a "bare metal" platform?

Yes, you are right.

Barebox is something like busybox, but for bare-metal

I have seen some materials in the ML wiki, and in the CHDK wiki about camera' hardware. Appearence of barebox on DIGIC can make hardware investigation more comfortable. IMHO it is possible to use barebox for easy uploading ML/CHDK image into the camera without memory card manipulations.

[frantony]

wow, very cool.
i am not sure how we would merge this into Magic Lantern, but i like the idea a lot.

the only VERY practical thing i can think about is building an abstraction level to select the ML version to boot.
depending on the camera model and firmware version it loads the specific ML version.

We already actually merged some stuff from barebox into ML

There are many things that can be imported from barebox into ML, but not only the code running on camera. E.g. barebox uses scripts for incoming inspection of patches. This scripts decrease the number of errors in souce code and make the developer's life easier. Just now I'm working on incoming inspection scripts for ML.

[1%]

Maybe replace the installers with U-Boot.