From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Thomas Petazzoni Date: Sat, 14 Sep 2013 07:41:24 +0200 Subject: [Buildroot] BeagleBoneBlack Updates? In-Reply-To: <20130913153827.46f1c747d8fb425408b5c75b@lavabit.com> References: <20130913153827.46f1c747d8fb425408b5c75b@lavabit.com> Message-ID: <20130914074124.2e98d5db@skate> List-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: buildroot@busybox.net Dear rh, On Fri, 13 Sep 2013 15:38:27 -0700, rh wrote: > I've heard that someone (TI) was supposed to be getting code into > the kernel 3.12-rc series. But I saw a message recently and it looked > like the 3.12 merge window was missed so 3.13 is the target. A patch adding a basic Device Tree for the BBB has been posted on the Linux ARM kernel mailing list. But the support is fairly minimal, i.e MMC/SD is not even supported, for example. > Some in the linux kernel aren't fond of ARM devices so maybe there's > a logjam. I really don't see where this statement comes from. There are gazillions of patches being integrated to support ARM devices. I've myself worked over the last year on upstreaming the support for some ARM processors, and while it certainly requires some work, I clearly don't think there is some resistance against ARM devices at all. > But I've also been told that it's due to lack of resources at > TI. I believe this is more the problem. TI already had issues getting the complete support for their SoCs merged in mainline (due to the complexity of their SoC, and also probably due to the internal organization of TI), but now TI has laid off a huge number of engineers, including some of which where working on upstreaming work. So there's even less work force in TI to do this work. And on the other hand, the CircuitCo guys have not tried at all to submit any of their patches to mainline (the Device Tree patch mentioned above being the first one). Their excuse is that they have been having issues to cooperate with TI on upstreaming effort, but when we see how long it takes TI to bring stuff in mainline, there is certainly room for others to contribute. However, I admit it is hard to do mainline work when the SOC vendor is also doing something, but you don't know what. > So maybe BBB will truly be a DIY platform. The problem that exists > is that using the wrong device tree code can result in destroying devices. > It seems that some people have done that and blown up their HDMI > interface. This is if you use the mainline kernel. The BBB defconfig in Buildroot will use the BBB-custom kernel provided by CircuitCo, because we should certainly offer to our users a kernel that allows to use as many features as possible of the BBB. Best regards, Thomas -- Thomas Petazzoni, Free Electrons Kernel, drivers, real-time and embedded Linux development, consulting, training and support. http://free-electrons.com