[U-Boot] [PATCH] orion5x: edminiv2: add libata support

[Albert ARIBAUD <albert.aribaud@free.fr>]

Le 01/07/2010 09:36, Tor Krill a ?crit :
> On Wed, 2010-06-30 at 23:30 +0200, Albert Aribaud wrote:
>> Signed-off-by: Albert Aribaud<albert.aribaud@free.fr>
>> ---
>> This patch:
>> - adds support in libata for the orion5x MVSATAHC controller;
>> - enables orion5x MVSTAHC port 1 on the edmini board;
>> - adds IDE and EXT2 commands to the edminiv2 command set.
>
> Just a heads up. I posted a patch with a sata-driver for kirkwood a
> while back. (We use this with our board and it seems to work fine)
>
> http://lists.denx.de/pipermail/u-boot/2010-June/073147.html
>
> Which might have some similarities to the sata controller on orion.
>
> /Tor

Thanks Tor -- Now we're both informed of each other's dev. :)

First off : the MVSATAHC controller is indeed quite similar between both 
SoCs, at least from a u-boot perspective, where disk usage is limited to 
loading a kernel and initrd. IIRC its code is already shared on the 
Linux side between orion5x and kirkwood.

I see your sata_mv driver originates in the Linux kernel driver and 
makes use of DMA. This might be a real gain when loading big files often 
; in my case, I considered that u-boot will only kick in once in a while 
and load a less-than-2MB kernel and possibly a less-than-3MB initrd, and 
while relying on the IDE PIO code will certainly make it slower than 
with sata_mv, the occasional couple of 10th of ms is a fair price for 
the very small footprint -- ED Mini V2 is short on NOR Flash space.

Amicalement,
-- 
Albert.