Re: Introducing meta-beagleboard

[Jack Mitchell <ml@communistcode.co.uk>]

On 12/10/12 15:04, Denys Dmytriyenko wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 11:24:35AM +0100, Jack Mitchell wrote:
>> On 11/10/12 16:46, Jason Kridner wrote:
>>> To help foster fast development, future releases of the Angstrom
>>> Distribution that ships with BeagleBoard.org platforms (such as
>>> BeagleBone and BeagleBoard-xM) will be built using meta-beagleboard,
>>> rather than meta-ti. While this produces the seemingly undesirable
>>> effect of providing yet-another-BSP for BeagleBoard.org platforms,
>>> collaboration in the mainline kernel and bootloaders that are the key
>>> elements for the BSPs has made this possible and multiple goals for
>>> the various BSPs has made it desirable.
>>>
>>> The objectives for meta-beagleboard are:
>>> 1) Provide the best possible out-of-box-experience for BeagleBoard.org platforms
>>> 2) Enable as much add-on hardware as possible
>>> 3) Enable public contributions to extend the experience and hardware support
>>> 4) Deliver information to the BeagleBoard.org community regarding the
>>> development status
>>>
>>> The repository will be hosted at:
>>> https://github.com/beagleboard/meta-beagleboard
>> Great news! Will the kernel in this BSP be attempting to follow
>> mainline + public patches? I'm chomping at the bit for an easy way
>> to build a tested DT kernel with recent patches.
> Jack,
>
> Here's a little bit of information to help you and others understand the
> situation a bit better.
>
> The beagleboard kernel recipe in meta-ti was already following mainline +
> public patches. As of the beaglebone:
>
> The mainline kernel team for am335x inside TI has been hard at work pushing
> patches upstream for quite a while now. You can see significant improvements
> in the mainline kernel already, even in 3.6, when it comes to supporting
> am335x. But the goal is to have most, if not all, of the features in place by
> the time Linus releases 3.8 kernel. According to the schedule, that is around
> the end of this year or early next year.
>
> Due to limited resources of testing and validation, the integration team
> decided to not spend time on kernels between the last staging (i.e. PSP) 3.2
> kernel and 3.8, when everything is available in mainline.
>
> Unfortunately, that does not work for BeagleBoard.org and Koen needs mainline
> support sooner, integrating incomplete 3.6 and 3.7 with the work-in-progress
> patches. That's one of the points behind creating meta-beagleboard layer.
>
> That said, meta-ti will also be switching to the mainline kernel once it is
> available, i.e. with 3.8 release. It's just that meta-beagleboard gets there
> sooner... :)
>

Perfect, thank you Denys. That also explains why the PSP releases for 
the BBone haven't been very forthcoming. I have been watching the 
mainline patches come in but didn't realise that TI were heading for 3.8 
'full' support. I will be looking forward to it, I can almost taste that 
eDMA

Cheers,

-- 

   Jack Mitchell (jack@embed.me.uk)
   Embedded Systems Engineer
   http://www.embed.me.uk

--