We went the uboot way with beagle because the I2C subsystem in linux sucks for things like this. When we were implementing it there was no sane way to do:
1) register eeprom with i2c
2) read eeprom
3) register additional i2c devices on the expansion board
And of course in-kernel muxing didn't work back then.
To illustrate the problem a bit more, all camera sensor boards use the same I2C id for the sensor, so you can't register them all at once, you need to know which one is attached. So for the beagleboard xM we'd need the following:
a) being able to read the eeprom from linux and (re)initialize extra i2c devices, SPI, mmc, uart, etc
b) being able to read the ID register from the camera sensor and (re)setup the i2c data and v4l2 stuff
Personally, I don't care where the logic resides, it just needs to work and be expandable.
regards,
Koen