Main-line U-Boot for i.MX6 (Sabre Lite and Nitrogen6X)

We've been promising this for a while, but we're finally ready to start shipping a version of U-Boot for our i.MX6 boards (Sabre Lite and Nitrogen6X) that's based on main-line U-Boot.

We are still a couple of steps away from telling you to grab the latest from the real main-line U-Boot repository, or even the i.MX maintainer's repository, but there's just too much functionality in main-line to continue shipping versions based on U-Boot 2009-08.

Since there are still some gaps, the following table illustrates the functionality of peripherals and software. The columns show whether the feature is available in the Freescale (2009-08) release and in our Main-line source tree.

In posts to follow, we'll provide guidance on how to get, compile and install the updates.

Function	2009-08	Main-line
SPI NOR	Supported	Supported
USB Host	uncertain	Supported
USB Slave	Supported	Not supported
SATA	Partial	Supported
SD Card	Supported	Supported
Displays
Freescale LVDS	uncertain	Supported
Boundary LVDS	unsupported	Supported
Boundary RGB	unsupported	Supported
HDMI	unsupported	Supported
Filesystems
FAT	Supported	Supported
ext2	Supported	Supported
ext3	Supported	Supported
ext4	unsupported	Supported
Other peripherals and functionality
Fastboot	Supported	Unsupported
Freescale Mfg Tool	Supported	Unsupported
OTP	Supported	Supported
bmode	Supported	Supported
Ethernet	Supported	Supported
PHY	Supported	Supported
HDMI detection	Unsupported	Supported
I2C detection	Unsupported	Supported
Button press	Unsupported	Supported
Secure boot	Supported	Unsupported

As you can see, there are a number of new features in the new code base, notably support for SATA, ext4 and various displays. There are also a number of performance enhancements and support for device trees, which will become important for upcoming kernel versions.

In case you missed it, we discussed the details of display support in this post describing native access to a single display under U-Boot, and this post describing auto-configuration for Linux.

Stay tuned for more details.