Qi is a boot manager. It is designed to replace uBoot. But Qi will be simpler and faster.
Qi's concept is it leaves everything possible to Linux, that includes even the video init. Therefore Qi does NOT provide a boot menu. The usual NOR uBoot menu you use to flash your Neo (Aux first, power second, wait for menu) of course works fine, but if you try the usual procedure to fire up NAND uBoot (Power first, aux second, wait for menu) you get no response. (not even the 'backlighted black screen')
Qi will boot from any kernel named 'uImage.bin' in the /boot folder in the root of an ext2/ext3 partition - first partition - on the uSD. Failing to find that, it will boot from the kernel in NAND (if the kernel works of course, see below). Failing to find that, it will blink the blue Power LED a fraction of a second every 10 secs or so to say nothing valid to boot.
Stopwatch results on Qi (error is approx ±1/2 second):
Booting SHR image with uBoot: 0:00 power button held down 0:07 splash screen appears 0:15 drops to console showing kernel messages scrolling by for ~1 minute 1:18 Openmoko 'please wait' splash 1:31 desktop animated splash 2:38 finished booting
Booting identical setup with Qi flashed over uBoot: 0:00 power button held down 0:06 backlit black 0:13 please wait booting... (only this text on console for next 38 seconds) 0:51 Angstrom console message (at the end of kernel output with uBoot, but ONLY text display to appear throughout this stage with Qi) 0:54 Openmoko 'please wait' splash 1:05 desktop animated splash 1:54 finished booting
So for this particular configuration, it reduced time-to-desktop by about 28%, about 44 seconds. Surprisingly, the later segments of booting (desktop) were also noticeably faster than with uBoot - One would have expected just the fist stages up until init (kernel finished establishing itself) to be faster.