View source for Merge DFU support into mainline U-Boot

; Summary: Merge DFU support into mainline U-Boot

; Proposer: Stefan Schmidt

== Description ==

The USB Implementers Forum have created an official Device Firmware Upgrade
(DFU) USB device class. This simplifies and standardizes the process of
upgrading firmware greatly as the device is able to describe named partitions.
The user merely selects the target partition by name and specifies the file to
write to it. It is even bidirectional -- DFU may be used to extract the firmware
from the device. This leads to obvious and trivial methods for backing up and
restoring not only the devices operating code, but even the user's personal data
and configuration settings.

Openmoko has implemented support for this spec in their fork of U-Boot. Their
U-Boot appears to be in good shape though as it is maintained in a git repo
forked from the mainline tree around version 1.3.2. This should ease the
process of reviewing changes and updating to newer versions greatly.

The dfu-utils userspace package (based on libusb, so portable to Windows/MAC
OSX/BSDs/etc...) can be used for device detection, partition selection, flash
read and flash write. Only a USB cable is needed to attach the device  to your
computer -- no need to talk to the device yourself over something messy like a
serial console let alone be forced to run the commands yourself
(load/erase/write/etc...). This makes it a lot easier to update the firmware
during development as well as doing an update in the field by the customer or
field service engineer.

The Openmoko patches will be updated to work with the U-Boot git version,
remaining bugs will get fixed, review incorporated and worked on until merged
into U-Boot mainline.

== Related work ==

    * DFU Utilities: http://dfu-util.gnumonks.org/
    * USB DFU Spec: http://www.usb.org/developers/devclass_docs/DFU_1.1.pdf

== Scope ==

This should take about a month to update, test, and merge.

== Contractor Candidates ==

As the current maintainer and core developer of the dfu-utils and someone who
has worked at Openmoko during the development of the DFU implementation I would
nominate myself.

== Comments ==

[[Category:Project proposals 2011]]