AW: Submitting patches for Kontron-boards with Freescale processors

["Claus Gindhart" <Claus.Gindhart@kontron.com>]

Kumar,

Due to your E-Mail i have checked into the linuxppc mailing lists. I am aware now of the restructuring process in the Kernel regarding the flattened device tree for passing parameters from the Bootloader to the Kernel.

Actually all Kontron-PowerPC-Boards, (VME-, CompactPCI- and E²Brain- boards) are equipped with the Kontron NetBootLoader. This Ecos-based bootloader currently passes all parameters to the Kernel via an E²PROM-Device. We have also some custom projects using U-Boot, but our standard products all have the Kontron Bootloader.

The question is now: Will it be a mandatory requirement, that the Bootloader provides the flattened device list, or will it be allowed in future to provide a platform-specific function, which generates the flattened device tree (as we previously did within the embed_config() function, where we built the struct bd_t) ?

- Claus

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Kumar Gala [mailto:galak@kernel.crashing.org]
Gesendet: Montag, 19. Dezember 2005 16:07
An: Claus Gindhart
Cc: Linux Kernel List
Betreff: Re: Submitting patches for Kontron-boards with Freescale
processors



On Dec 19, 2005, at 2:07 AM, Claus Gindhart wrote:

> Kumar,
>
> in our department we have Linux 2.6 kernel ports for Kontron  
> embedded computer boards with freescale processors 8245, 405, 8540,  
> 8541, 8347, 8270, ...
>
> We would like to start now to submit all these board supports to  
> the vanilla kernel.
>
> For the start we would select one of our common boards, e.g. the  
> one with 8540/8541 processor.
>
> My question is now:
> Should we try to provide a patch with all HW-features of the board  
> supported, or would it be better to start with a minimalistic  
> patch, and then add support for additional devices onboard (e.g.  
> IDE, RTC, SuperIO, ...) time by time ?
>
> Or would it be better to provide the full feature set of this board  
> at one time ?

First, I would recommend posting such queries to the linuxppc lists  
(linuxppc-dev@ozlabs.org, linuxppc-embedded@ozlabs.org).

Second, I'm no longer at Freescale so please email me at this address.

Ok, now to your question.  In general if a given board port touch  
files in arch/ppc/platforms/* than all of that code should be in one  
patch.  If you are touching anything in drivers/* you need to  
separate out those patches and send them to the respective driver  
maintainers.  If you want to provide a more detailed list of changes  
for 8540/8541 I can provide better directions on how to submit patches.

What boot loader are you using for your boards?  I ask because for  
the 85xx and 83xx subarchitectures I'm trying to limit new board  
ports in arch/ppc as we try to transition to arch/powerpc.  However,  
this requires that the firmware provide a flatten device tree to the  
kernel.

Hopefully that gets you a sense and feel free to ask any other  
questions.

- kumar


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