[Solved] uboot not in Portage?

[TJNII]

This caught me by surprise:

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# emerge uboot
Calculating dependencies... done!
Dependency resolution took 4.93 s (backtrack: 0/20).


emerge: there are no ebuilds to satisfy "uboot".

emerge: searching for similar names...
emerge: Maybe you meant any of these: app-emacs/uboat, sys-boot/tboot, app-misc/broot?

I don't see it on https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/search?q=uboot either.

uboot seems like a natural fit for the Gentoo build process as a quick skim of https://docs.u-boot.org/en/latest/build/gcc.html shows all the usual flags we know and love from /etc/portage/make.conf. I've just started reading about how how the boot sequence on the SBC I'm using works and it really doesn't seem that complicated, is there a reason uboot isn't in Portage? Seems like a large and obvious gap, and when I find a large and obvious gap it usually means there's something large I don't actually understand.

[pingtoo]

In my opinion, DAS U-boot is very hard to put in to Portage because it is very much customised for each platform/board.

There are too many variations to consider for building u-boot for a given condition, also the cross compiler tool chain some time need to be special for some boards so it is not a good candidate for Portage.

However there is dev-embedded/u-boot-tools ebuild that provide mkimage and friends from u-boot tool sub-directory.

[TJNII]

Aah, fair enough.

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make <board name>_defconfig

masks a lot of that complexity in the install instructions. Not in a bad way, the instructions worked for me as expected on a mainlined board. But I the first time I got into menuconfig and quickly backed out seeing all the low level options, not wanting to toggle something accidentally.

Guess that was the "don't know what I don't know" factor.