Re: [Buildroot] [PATCH v1 1/1] boot/xilinx-embeddedsw: add family variant choice

From: Thomas Petazzoni via buildroot <buildroot@buildroot.org>
To: Luca Ceresoli <luca.ceresoli@bootlin.com>
Cc: "Erkiaga Elorza, Ibai" <ibai.erkiaga-elorza@amd.com>,
	"buildroot@buildroot.org" <buildroot@buildroot.org>,
	"brandon.maier@collins.com" <brandon.maier@collins.com>,
	"ju.o@free.fr" <ju.o@free.fr>,
	"Frager, Neal" <neal.frager@amd.com>,
	"romain.naour@smile.fr" <romain.naour@smile.fr>,
	"Simek, Michal" <michal.simek@amd.com>,
	"romain.naour@gmail.com" <romain.naour@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Buildroot] [PATCH v1 1/1] boot/xilinx-embeddedsw: add family variant choice
Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2025 12:33:35 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20250813123335.3c421094@windsurf> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20250813102024.3d15c0c6@booty>

On Wed, 13 Aug 2025 10:20:24 +0200
Luca Ceresoli <luca.ceresoli@bootlin.com> wrote:

> > Perhaps a global SoC family definition for bootloaders could make sense.  
> 
> For the need discussed in this thread, a shortcut was found based on
> the fortunate coincidence that all SoC families impacted by
> xilinx-embeddedsw are based on a different CPU core (a72, a53...).
> However this is not necessarily happening in similar future use cases.
> 
> So I'm raising this topic to the attention of core Buildroot developers
> as the next Buildroot Developer Days are coming in a short time. Some
> discussion there may be useful to bring ideas and opinions about how to
> handle such SoC-family-specific differentiation within packages ina
> generic way.

I haven't followed the whole discussion. We do already have some SoC
selection for i.MX platforms somewhere in package/freescale-imx/.

I am a bit balanced with this idea of having a top-level SoC selection.
On one hand it would indeed help to show/not show relevant packages. On
the other hand, people will think "my SoC is not in this list, so
Buildroot doesn't support it" just like people already think "there is
no defconfig in Buildroot, so Buildroot doesn't support my platform".
Also, it would be a quite long list to maintain. So I'm not fully
against, but I'm not super sold to it as well.

So far on the bootloaders side, I believe what matters is appropriate
help text describing for which platform a given package is designed, if
it's a platform-specific package.

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, co-owner and CEO, Bootlin
Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering and training
https://bootlin.com
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