Comment 2 for bug 837032

On Tue, 30 Aug 2011 04:15:29 -0000, warmcat <email address hidden> wrote:
> The difficulty is that as it stands, Panda naturally always wants to
> boot into the X-loader / U-Boot it finds on the SD Card.
>
> If we teleported in a broken X-loader / U-Boot because that's what we
> wanted to have tested, then we kind of brick the Panda until someone
> comes and rewrites the SD by hand or swaps in a good card. That's not
> really acceptable.
>
> One solution to this is to provide a fake SD card PCB which comes out
> into two SD sockets. One contains a stable reference boot image and
> initrd, the other contains the test image. By one out-of-band means or
> another, we allow the test system to select which of the SD cards is
> visible to the Panda after reset.

Do you know of such a thing? If one exists, it would be mightily useful
for all sorts of tricks.

I believe most boards we are interested in support ways of supplying the
boot loader dynamically, for instance OMAP4 has something called "USB
Peripheral Boot Mode". I have no idea how this works in practice though
:-) Zygmunt has been thinking about this, I believe.

Cheers,
mwh