Up until now, U-boot would only support the User datagram protocol (UDP) allowing for TFTP and NFS boot, but Linaro has now added support for TCP and HTTP in U-boot in order to boot Linux from common web servers. TFTP boot from U-boot has been supported for years, as around the year 2006 I remember implementing TFTP Linux boot for a Karaoke system in order to lower the BoM cost by selecting a smaller flash device, and I also explained how to boot Linux on a TV box with TFTP back in 2014. This requires installing a TFTP server on your server, which is quite a trivial task, but HTTP servers are omnipresent, so it’s a welcome addition to U-boot. If you want to use HTTP to boot Linux, it needs to be enabled in the U-boot config:
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CONFIG_PROT_TCP=y CONFIG_PROT_TCP_SACK=y CONFIG_CMD_WGET=y |
The top and bottom options are pretty obvious, and the second […]