[ECOS] RedBoot's load and fileio

[Sergei Gavrikov]

Hello

Does anybody know what was a reason to suppress in RedBoot an ability
to load files in RAM from a file on the mounted filesystem(s)? A while
ago I was looking for something like

Redboot>load /bin/shell
Redboot>go

keeping in a mind that application would be placed on jffs2 and it was
surprise for me that I cannot do it, because such an ability commented
out in load.c (it is here: load.c:do_load():782). When I did remove
the comment and change that check as `s/fileio_mounted/mount_count/' it
was possible to use the ability to load a stuff directly from the
filesystem.

In RedBoot's ChangeLog:2003-11-27 I saw a record from David Woodhouse

	* cdl/redboot.cdl, fs/fileio.c, include/fs/fileio.h, src/load.c: 
	Support for mounting and loading files from fileio file systems
	such as JFFS2.

and I found nothing about a rejecting the ability. Any comments from
eCos veterans and RedBoot's experts?

Of course, XYZMODEM, TFTP, and HTTP are nice load methods for a debug
cycle, but, we really have not a method to load and run applications
(except `exec' for Linux kernel) from the filesystem, have we? My test
was done for JFFS2 FS and it worked (well, JFFS2 can be bloat for some
targets), but somebody would use, for example, ROMFS FS.  Must we use
a load method from FIS only (and if we must, then why) for such cases
(mount, load and go)? Excuse me, if I missed something.

Thank you for the comments,

Sergei

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